Rnnk ^ S 9 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS 
IN PALESTINE 



BY 



HENRIETTA SZOLD 



it from the American Jewish Year Book 5676] 



philadelphia 
Jewish Publication Society of America 



COPYEIGHT, 1915, BY 

The Jewish Publication Society of Amebica 




JUDEA 



1 Abu Djudje 

2 En-Gannim 

3 Artuf 

4 Ben Shamen 

5 Bir Adas 

6 Bir Jacob 

7 Dilb 

8 Djemama 

9 Ekron 

10 Hulda 

11 Kafruria 

12 Kastinieh 

13 Katra 

14 Mikweh Israel 

15 Moza 

16 Petah Tikwah 

17 Rehobot 

18 Rishon le-Zion 

19 Wady 

el-Hanin 

20 Jehudieh 

II Samaria 

21 Athlit 

22 Hederah 

23 Hefzi-bah 

24 Kafr Saba 

25 Kerkur-Bedus 

26 Zichron Jacob 

27 Tantura 

III Galilee 

28 En-Zeitun 

29 Bed j en 

30 Hattin 

31 Yemma 

32 Kinneret 

33 Milhamieh 

34 Merhawiah 

35 Mesha 

36 Metullah 

37 Medjdel 

38 Mishmar 

ha-Yarden 
39« Mizpah 

40 Poriah 

41 Rosh-Pinnah 

42 Sedjera 

43 Yesod 

ha-Maalah 

IV Trans- 

JORDANIA 

44 Bene Jehudah 

45 Daganiah 

46 Mat aba 



THE JEWISH COLONIES OF PALESTINE 
24 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS 
IN PALESTINE 

BY 

HENRIETTA SZOLD 



CONTENTS 

FAGE 

Introduction 27 

The Population: Elements and Size 31 

The Rural Development: First Period of Colonization 

(1882-1899) 37 

The Rural Development: Second Period of Colonization 

(1900-1914) 48 

The Rural Development: Life in the Jewish Villages. ... 84 

The Urban Development 98 

The Cultural Development 123 

A Land of Possibilities 139 

Conclusion: Palestine and the United States 149 

7 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 



INTRODUCTION 

Educational Development — Agricultural Development — Zionism. 

During the long epoch since the destruction of the Second 
Temple in 70 C. E., Israel has not wearied of avowing, in 
poem and prayer, his love for the Holy Land. The imagery 
of his passion he perforce had to borrow from the sacred 
writers who had been privileged to live in the adored land. 
But the feeling of the " exile " was none the less real, and as' 
often as could be he translated it into acts. That edict after 
edict was issued by whilom masters forbidding Jews to set 
foot on the beloved soil, was not a deterrent to one who cher- 
ished Palestine as the home of eternal verities, and believed 
that breathing its air made men wise. It seems — the infor- 
mation we have is too fragmentary to permit of an unqualified 
statement — that there never was a period in which some J ews 
did not brave danger in order to satisfy the yearning of their 
soul for the land of the fathers. Now and again propitious 
circumstances assembled them in fairly compact bodies in 
Jerusalem, Hebron, and elsewhere. In the fifteenth century 
we are even told of an agricultural settlement of sixty Jewish 
families near Gaza. In brief, Jehudah Halevi, the French 
and English rabbis of the thirteenth century, and Nahmanides, 
were the exemplars anticipated and imitated by their humbler 
coreligionists in all the countries and centuries of the exile. 
After Nahmanides, the attraction exercised by the land of 



28 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



" spiritual opportunities " became more and more irresistible. 
Travelers relate that in all parts there could be met groups 
of Jewish residents, both Sefardim and Ashkenazim, some 
among them artisans, a few tradesmen, most of them recluse 
religionists. The expulsion from Spain brought considerable 
additions, and since then the growth has been steady, though 
it did not become large until after 1882. 

It is only within the past sixty years, however, that the 
Jewish residents of Palestine have become an organic part 
of the land. The purpose of the following pages is to trace 
the lines of their material and spiritual progress during this 
period. 

Three events, occurring at intervals of about twenty years, 
typify the development of the Palestinian Jewish community 
during the last two generations approximately. 

The first is the opening of a school on modern lines in 
Jerusalem. At the suggestion of the poet Ludwig August 
Frankl, Elise von Herz-Lamel, of Vienna, founded it, in 1856, 
in memory of her father. The object of excommunications 
on the part of the ultra-pious, it nevertheless was the fore- 
runner of a still-lengthening series of educational institutions 
created by lovers of the Holy Land, chiefly through the agency 
of such organizations as the Alliance Israelite Universelle, the 
Chovevei Zion, and the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden. The 
system includes everything from the Kindergarten to the 
Gymnasium, and, over and above the primary, secondary, and 
collegiate schools, an arts and crafts institute, agricultural 
colleges, industrial and technical classes, a commercial school, 
two conservatories of music, and courses for Kindergarten 
teachers, elementary teachers, and Rabbis. These nourish side 
by side with long-established and recently-established Hedarim, 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 29 

Talmud Torahs, and Yeshibot. For a complete system of 
education on the Occidental pattern there is lacking only a 
University, and towards establishing a University the first 
steps have already been taken. 

The second epochal event is the founding, in 1878, of an 
agricultural settlement at Petah Tikwah in Judea, by Jews 
from Jerusalem. The attempt to draw the Jewish city- 
dwellers to rural homes and occupations proved abortive. It 
remained for the pogrom years 1881-1882 to provide indomit- 
able pioneers in the persons of refugees from Eussia. They 
founded Eishon le-Zion in the same region, and resumed the 
settlement of Petah Tikwah, now become the most populous 
of the forty or more Jewish villages and estates in Palestine. 
At practically the same time the idea of Palestine coloniza- 
tion was advanced by Eoumanian Jews, who established 
Zichron Jacob in Samaria, and Eosh Pinnah and Yesod ha- 
Maalah followed quickly in Galilee. These were the first- 
fruits of the " love of Zion " (Hibbat Zion) movement. In 
one form the agitation for. colonizing Palestine had been 
begun as early as 1860 by Eabbi Hirsh Kalisher, the same 
who had induced the Alliance Israelite Universelle, through 
Charles Netter, to found the Agricultural School Mikweh 
Israel, in 1870. In the " eighties," when Jews everywhere 
were aroused by the events in Eussia to the need of adopting 
broad measures of relief, the idea became more articulate. 
Palestine colonizing societies sprang up in Europe and Amer- 
ica: the Bnei Zion of Eussia and England, the Kadimah of 
Vienna, the Ezra of Berlin, the Shove Zion of the United 
States. In Eussia alone there were at least fifteen societies, 
the most important in Odessa, Bielistock, Warsaw, Vilna, 



30 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



Pinsk, and Moscow. At the notable Conference at Kattowitz, 
in 1884, they were consolidated into the Montefiore Federa- 
tion, and in 1887 into the Chovevei Zion; finally, in 1890, 
after nine years of feverish activity, the movement was legiti- 
mized by the Eussian Government, under the name The Com- 
mittee for the Promotion of Agriculture and Handicrafts 
among the Jews of Syria and Palestine, with its seat in 
Odessa, whence it has been called briefly the Odessa Com- 
mittee. 

The third event was the organization of the Zionist move- 
ment at the International Congress of Jews called by Theodor 
Herzl, in Basle, in 1897. The platform of the movement, 
providing for the creation of " a publicly-recognized and 
legalfy-assured home for the Jewish people in Palestine," is 
the precisest formulation and the most inclusive of the " love 
of Zion 99 idea. Five years later the Eussian Chovevei Zion 
societies, or the Odessa Committee, as they were then called, 
accepted it unreservedly. Zionism aims at making the devel- 
opment of the Holy Land the concern of the whole of the 
Diaspora. And as in the Dispersion it desires to enlist the 
united forces of an organized world Jewry, so in Palestine its 
sphere is Jewish life in the whole. Its impetus does not 
flow through educational and agricultural channels alone. 
It consciously seeks to affect and shape trade in Palestine, 
industry, finance, scientific investigations, general cultural 
enterprises, in a word, the complete social organization of 
the Jewish population in the Holy Land to the point at which 
it becomes economically independent of the J ews " outside of 
the land," of their alms, and gifts, and tribute, and of their 
planning and action in its behalf. 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 31 



THE POPULATION 

ELEMENTS AND SIZE 

Old and New Settlement— The Exiles from Spain — Sefardic Ele- 
ments — Ottomanization — Population of Palestine — Languages 
— Growth of Jewish Population — Recent Immigration — Emi- 
gration. 

The development here outlined proceeded, at the beginning 
and for many years after the beginning, on the assumption 
that the historical Jewish sentiment for the Holy Land was 
not only a powerful asset, but an actual and sufficient basis for 
an organized solution of the Jewish problem. Yet there is a 
difference between the aroma, as it were, of the sentiment as 
manifested by the New Settlement, the descriptive name as- 
sumed by the immigrants since 1882, and that of the Old 
Settlement, composed of those who come to the Holy Land' 
for purely religious reasons, to devote themselves to study and 
prayer and to live a life wholly Jewish in practice and thought. 
They come " back " to the Holy Land, which is Palestine ; the 
new immigrants come to Palestine, which is the Holy Land. 
The latter likewise aspire to complete Jewish living and think- 
ing, only they wish to express themselves J ewishly not only in 
study and prayer, but also in work and play. The Old Settle- 
ment looks upon itself as the religious "representative" of 
the secular Jewish world outside. The New Settlement strives 
to build up a self-sufficient Palestinian Jewish community. 

In evaluating the New Palestine, all the elements composing 
the two Settlements are equally important. 

The first large influx of Jews to be reckoned with in modern 
life came when Sultan Bajazet II opened the doors of Turkey 
hospitably to the Jews driven from Spain in 1492 and from 
Portugal a few years later. By the beginning of the sixteenth 
century communities of Sefardim, with Ashkenazic accessions, 



32 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



were established in J erusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and especially 
Safed, the gathering-place of mystics and scholars. In 1800 
the descendants of the exiles, together with the so-called 
" Arab 93 Jews, the descendants of Jews that never left the 
East, are said to have numbered 3000 in the land. Not until 
the middle of the eighteenth century were they joined by 
considerable permanent groups of the Ashkenazic division. 
The newer settlers hailed chiefly from Poland and Southern 
Russia. They belonged largely to the sect of the Hasidim, and 
they gravitated for a century towards the Galilean centers, 
Safed and Tiberias, made famous by Cabalists and saints. 
Since about the middle of the last century the immigrants 
from Eastern and Central Europe have been spreading over 
the whole country, first to the towns and from 1882 on to the 
rural districts. This brings us up to the date of the New 
Settlement. During the last generation immigrants in in- 
creasing numbers have been coming from Eussia, Bulgaria, 
Austria (Galicia, Bukowina, Transylvania), Hungary, Bou- 
mania, Germany, Holland, and the United States. They have 
swelled the Ashkenazic section until it is said to have reached 
now 85,000 out of the 100,000 Jews estimated to live in Pales- 
tine. But not by any means may the New Settlement claim all 
the late-comers. Some of them must be counted as belonging 
to the Old Settlement. 

The Sefardic community has not been left unaugmented. 
The additions from Oriental countries during the last three- 
quarters of a century are, indeed, not Sefardim in the strict 
sense of the term, but as they approximate the Spanish- 
Portuguese in liturgy and ritual, the convenient classification 
may be applied not only to the North African Maghrebim, 
from Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, but also to the 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 33 



" Arab 99 J ews ; to the Jews from Persia (the Adjami) ; to 
the Jews from Bokhara, Mesopotamia, and the Syrian cities 
Aleppo and Urfa (the latter called the Urfali) ; to those 
from Transcancasian Daghestan and Georgia (the Gurdji or 
Grusinians) ; and to the Yemenites from the Arabian Penin- 
sula. Most of these groups foregather in Jerusalem. "With 
the earlier Sefardim they number there 13,200 it is estimated, 
though some authorities double this number. If we accept the 
former estimate, and the estimate of 85,000 Ashkenazic Jews, 
we are forced to the supposition that only 1800 Sefardim live 
outside of Jerusalem, in Jaffa, Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed. 

The Sefardic section has occupied a distinctive place in the 
economy of Jewish life in Palestine, by reason of the Ottoman 
citizenship of its members. Many of the sons of the early 
Eussian and Eoumanian colonists have also become Otto- 
mans, but among the immigrant Jews in the first generation 
there have been comparatively few willing to exchange the 
protection of the consuls of their European Governments for 
the jurisdiction of the Sublime Porte. What will be the 
attitude towards* Turkish naturalization now that the system 
of Capitulations has been abrogated and the European consuls 
have no larger rights than in other countries, cannot even be 
conjectured during the disorder of war times. That a number 
of J ews refused the liberal terms of the Ottoman Government 
when Turkey became a belligerent, and preferred to remain 
Russian, French, and English subjects, though their choice 
involved the hardship of leaving the country, proves nothing 
regarding the attitude of those who expect to make Palestine 
their permanent home. Some of them, fr instance, had taken 
up their domicile in Palestine only in order to give their 
children the opportunity of an education, denied to them by 



34 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



Russia, and naturally they were not prepared for the sudden 
and radical change of plans involved in a change of citizenship. 

The picture of the Jewish population requires the frame of 
the general population. There are the descendants of the 
Arabs that penetrated into Palestine in the seventh century 
and mixed with the Syrians, the older inhabitants of the 
country. Among them are about 105,000 Christians of various 
churches in the districts with which we are concerned. The 
Bedouins of the steppes, sparsely scattered through the coun- 
try, are the pure Arabs, and the Fellaheen, less pure, are the 
peasant stock. These two divisions are Moslems. Besides, 
there are Circassians and Kurds, few in number, imported by 
Sultan Abdul Hamid; a few thousand Druses in Upper Galilee ; 
Turks, mostly belonging to the official class; 2500 Suabian 
Germans, the Templars who settled in Palestine during the 
decade from 1870 to 1880, and are living in prosperous colo- 
nies near Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa; European Christians, 
the representatives of the religious establishments founded by 
the French, the Russians, the Germans, the English, the 
Americans, the Italians, and the Greeks; and the representa- 
tives of Oriental and African Churches, the Armenians, the 
Copts, and the Abyssinians — and more European and Eastern 
sects besides. 

Corresponding to this assortment of nationalities is the 
variety of languages spoken. One hears Arabic, Armenian, 
French, Turkish, German, Greek, Russian, Italian, and Eng- 
lish. Arabic is the vernacular of the country ; Turkish is used 
by the official class; French is still the lingua franca, and 
German has advanced to an important place latterly. The 
Jews, speaking any and all of them when occasion demands, 
have three more of their own: the Hebrew, rising steadily 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 35 



year by year to the rank of the J ewish vernacular ; the Yiddish 
brought into the country by the East European immigrants, 
and understood and spoken now by some Sef ardim and Arabs ; 
and the Ladino, or Spagniol, testifying, like the Yiddish, to 
the tenacious loyalty of the Jew. As the Yiddish is the Middle 
High German carried into Poland and mixed with Hebrew and 
Slavic elements, so the Ladino is the Castilian of the fifteenth 
century, which the Sefardic exiles brought with them from 
Spain and developed for daily life by the addition of Hebrew 
and Arabic or Turkish elements. 

The size and growth of the Jewish population cannot be 
left unnoted. Ezra Stiles, on the authority of Eabbi Isaac 
Hayyim Karigal, reports the number of Jewish families in the 
Holy Land in 1773 to be 1000. Recent figures must be 
quoted with as much reserve as KarigaPs. " It is said," " it 
is estimated," "approximately," must be prefixed to all, to 
indicate that they rest almost wholly on conjecture. This by 
way of caution in using tables like the following, though so 
reputable an authority as Mr. Davis Trietsch vouches for 
the statement that there were in Palestine 

10,000 Jews in 1840 

25,000 " " 1880 

43,000 " " 1890 

60,000 " " 1900 

95,000 " " 1910 

To show once for all how the guesses of the experts differ, 
it may be worth while to quote Doctor Ruppin's figures too. 
He places the number in 1880 at 35,000, and maintains that 
in 1910 it had risen only to 86,000. By a general consensus of 
opinion, 100,000 has been adopted as the present (1914) popu- 
lation. 



36 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



Of his 95,000 Mr. Trietsch assigns 82,150 to twelve towns, 
as against 202,700 Moslems and 95,000 Christians in the 
thirty towns of the region we are concerned with, the region 
in which Jews live. This leaves approximately 13,000 Jews 
for the rural settlements as against about 290,000 of the 
general population in the open country in the same region. 
In 1914 it was assumed that the rural Jewish population 
approximated 15,000. 

These figures may be regarded as coming sufficiently close 
to the truth to warrant making the general inference that 
Jewish immigration into Palestine is growing at a fairly rapid 
pace, a fact that gains in importance when it is remembered 
that the general population, especially the Arabic portion, has 
shown a tendency to be stationary. The percentage of increase 
in thirty years for the general population has been 40 ; for the 
Jews, 280. In 1880 the Jews formed 5$ of the whole popula- 
tion of about 500,000, and in 1910, 13.5$ of the whole popula- 
tion of 700,000. 

The two streams of immigrants of present importance 'flow 
from the Yemen, in southwestern Arabia, and from Eastern 
Europe, the latter through the ports of Odessa for Eussia, 
Constanza for Eoumania, and Trieste for Galicia. We have 
approximate figures for the Yemen, and somewhat more defi- 
nite data regarding Odessa. Both streams began to flow copi- 
ously Palestineward in the same year, 1882; both had their 
source in persecution; and both are largely feeders of the 
New Settlement. 

The early refugees from the Yemen settled in Jerusalem, 
where there is now a community of about 3000. Since 1908, 
according to a plan developed and applied by the Workmen's 
Union of Jaffa (Ha-Poel ha-Zair), arriving Yemenites have 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 37 

been directed to the colonies Kishon le-Zion, Rehobot, Petah 
Tikwah, Hederah, Yemma, and others. It is reckoned that 
during 1911-1912 there arrived 2000 of them, and during 1913 
they came at the rate of 120 a month. 

The figures for Odessa are complete only for those persons 
who applied to the Information Bureau of the Odessa Com- 
mittee. In the six years 1905 to 1910 there passed through to 
Palestine 12,965 persons, of whom about 30$ were under 30 
years of age. A little less than half intended to settle in 
Jerusalem and Hebron; 4814 in Jaffa, and 1646 in the 
colonies; 2041 went thither to end their days in the Holy 
Land; 297 were taken or sent thither for their schooling. 

Even these scanty statistics ought in fairness to be offset . 
by figures showing the emigration. But there are not enough 
data to make even guessing profitable. Only the general 
statement may be hazarded, that during the last few years, 
since Turkey has adopted a constitution, which imposes mili- 
tary duty upon all classes of the population alike, emigration 
has increased considerably, especially among the younger men. 

THE RURAL DEVELOPMENT 

FIEST PERIOD OF JEWISH COLONIZATION 
1882-1899 

Jews in Agriculture up to 1882 — The First Agriculturists — Baron 
de Rothschild — Chovevei Zion or Odessa Committee — Other 
Colonizing Forces — Independent Colonies — Recapitulation 
1882-1899 — Mishmar ha-Yarden — Hederah — Ekron — Criticism 
of System Adopted — Rishon le-Zion: Vine Plantations — 
Administrators. 

The New Settlement was wholly rural in character at the 
beginning. There was little J ewish experience to guide it. In 
Russia there had been over seventy-five years of farming in 
Jewish colonies, but they were wholly under Government 



38 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



tutelage. The experiments in the United States were simul- 
taneous with the Palestinian. Argentine and Cyprus came 
later. Only in Hungary there had long been isolated Jewish 
farmers on soil of their own. 

As for Palestine itself, besides the Gaza settlement in the 
fifteenth century, Don Joseph Nasi must be recorded and his 
endeavor, in the middle of the sixteenth century, to introduce 
mulberry plantations for the benefit of the Jews of Tiberias. 
In the Arab village of Pekiin there are Sefardic Jews who are 
engaged in rural pursuits, as their ancestors are said to have 
been for four hundred years in the same spot. During the 
nineteenth century three attempts at colonization preceded 
the Eussian-Eoumanian movement. Sir Moses Montefiore, 
after consultation with a few Jewish owners of farms in 
Palestine, tried, in 1854, to settle a group of thirty-five Safed 
Jews in Galilee. The Kalisher agitation drew Jerusalem 
Jews to Moza in 1873 and to Petah Tikwah in 1878. The 
first attempt ended before it was begun, the other two almost 
as soon as begun. This is the whole tale of the Jew in agri- 
culture in Palestine up to 1882. 

The Eussian and Eoumanian groups of settlers had as little 
preparation for their pioneer task as Montefiore's or Kalisher's. 
They were as a rule not agriculturists. Of conditions in 
Palestine, its climate, the soil, the land laws, the language, 
they knew as little as of ploughing and planting and harvesting. 
Very few had any capital to start with. Many, about ninety 
of them, were young students, members of the groups called 
Bilu (from the initials of the four Hebrew words of the phrase 
in Is. 2 : 5 : " house of Jacob, come ye, let us walk ") . 

If the colonists did not succumb, it was because their 
enthusiasm went a long way towards neutralizing hardships 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 39 



and the most grievous disappointments. The Bilus had to 
keep the wolf from the door by working as day-laborers for a 
pittance at the Mikweh Israel Agricultural School of the Alli- 
ance Israelite Universelle. Some of them did not even shrink 
from hiring themselves out as farm help to the Arabs in the 
neighboring villages. 

In spite of the grim determination of the colonists, an 
appeal for help had to be sent to Eussia before long. Thence 
it was carried to Baron Edmond de Bothschild by a delegation 
from among the colonists, and he promptly came to the rescue 
of Bishon le-Zion with money as well as with agricultural in- 
structors. From that moment until this day he has been to the 
colonists a very present help, the chief of the " lovers of Zion," 
in devotion to the cause rivaling the organized Chovevei Zion 
and the colonists themselves. Not only was he ready to put 
means, men, and what he thought expert advice at the disposal 
of the Bussian and Boumanian refugees in Palestine, for the 
undertakings which they started and failed to carry through, 
but infected by their zeal he became himself a colonizer. 
Ekron in Judea, which he called Mazkeret Bathia in honor 
of his mother, and Metullah in remote Upper Galilee were 
his own foundations. In the course of the seventeen years 
we are now considering he supported not only these his own 
colonies, but at one time or another, if not all the time, 
Bishon le-Zion and Petah Tikwah in Judea, Hederah and 
Zichron Jacob in Samaria, and Bosh Pinnah and Yesod ha- 
Maalah in Upper Galilee. Year after year he made land pur- 
chases, some to enlarge the area of the colonies under his 
protection, while others, on both sides of the Jordan, have 
constituted independent domains. 



40 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



Nothing daunted by Kishon le-Zion ? s distress, there were 
willing hands to undertake the resettlement of Petah Tikwah 
and the founding of Yesod ha-Maalah the very next year, in 
1883. Before another twelvemonth had passed, they too 
turned to Europe for help. At that time the various coloniza- 
tion groups, the Eussian and the Eoumanian, were to hold 
their first joint conference at Kattowitz. The Convention 
at once appropriated a sum for building houses and stables in 
these two colonies, for buying implements, digging wells, main- 
taining the colonists until harvest time, and securing the 
title to their land. Besides it was decided to send five young 
men to Zichron Jacob to study agriculture under the Eoths- 
child manager there. All this was a severe drain upon the 
treasury of the young Federation formed at Kattowitz. Never- 
theless, and in spite of the hard-luck stories from the pioneers, 
a resolution was adopted to make land purchases with a view 
to more extensive colonization. But the vanguard in Palestine 
apparently did not wait for the encouraging action of the 
Conference. At the very moment perhaps when it was taken 
in Europe, a new colony was born in Palestine, the Bilu settle- 
ment Katra (Gederah), for which the Federation bought 
70,000 vines. In the year following the Kattowitz Conference, 
$24,000 was expended on Palestine colonization, and $60,000 
by the end of 1889. During that period and thereafter, the 
Odessa Committee, as, it will be remembered, the Federation 
was called after 1890, stayed and supported Petah Tikwah, 
Katra, and Wady el-Hanin in Judea; Hederah in Samaria, 
into which alone it sank another $18,600 in eight experimen- 
tal years; and Yesod ha-Maalah and Mishmar ha-Yarden in 
Galilee. And yet, as though not to be outdone by " the well- 
known philanthropist," it became a colonizer on its own 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 41 



account. In the year 1896, when Baron de Eothschild planted 
Metullah to the north, it bought from him Kastinieh to the 
south, on which he had intended to settle Bessarabian farmers. 
They had failed him. Instead the Odessa Committee brought 
to it workingmen dismissed from the plantations in Kehobbt. 
The place was renamed Ber Tobiah, and $60,000 was lavished 
on a venture that has earned fairly satisfying returns, though 
the colony remains small in numbers and area. 

Baron de Eothschild and the Odessa Committee were in 
time joined by other colonizing forces. The B'nai B'rith lodge 
of Jerusalem took up lands at Moza, on the Jaffa road close to 
the city, that had been bought by some of Kalisher's supporters 
for a few Jerusalem families as far back as 1873. Without 
wholly abandoning it, they had never wholly developed it. 
Indeed the tiny colony can even now not be called a developed 
enterprise, though its experiences have a place of their own in 
the history of Palestine Jewish colonization. It is no mean 
distinction either that it offers an excursion ground beloved 
by the children of Jerusalem. 

One of the most important events of the period under con- 
sideration was the completion of the Jaffa-Jerusalem Kail- 
road in 1892. In studying the progress of the colonies in 
Judea it is a circumstance that must constantly be taken into 
account, though it is not the large factor it will become when 
the projected extension to Gaza and thence to Port Said 
is completed. Off the route subsequently taken by this rail- 
road, closer to Jerusalem than to Jaffa, the English Mission 
had bought Artuf, in 1883, in execution of plans with regard 
to the Eussian and Eoumanian refugees. Needless to say, the 
Mission failed of its purpose. Jews from Bulgaria took the 
land off the Mission's hands, but they succeeded no better 



42 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



with colonization than their predecessors with conversion. 
They struggled bravely, and the colony kept its head above 
water until the helper came. Of recent years sufficient private 
capital has been invested to enlarge its acreage to the point of 
productivity. 

Little Bene Jehudah, a Transjordanic settlement on the 
eastern shore of the Sea of Tiberias, established in 1886 by 
Jews from Safed and Tiberias, has not been so fortunate. 
Three families only have survived the fierce struggle, and 
they still raise grain on their 800 acres of land, a Jewish 
outpost at the edge of Bedouin territory. Help has been 
granted to them now and again, but never in sufficient measure 
to be effectual. 

There remains only one more colony to be mentioned 
specifically, the large colony of Eehobot in the Jaffa group. It 
belongs in a class by itself. Throughout its interesting history, 
beginning in 1890, it has been self-reliant and independent 
and successful besides. 

Let us picture the disposition of the Jewish colonies in 
the land in 1899 : A cluster of them was suspended as it 
were from J affa in a southern direction — Eishon le-Zion, Wady 
el-Hanin, Eehobot, Ekron, Katra, and Kastinieh, the last 
and remotest hardly more than twenty miles away from 
the port city. Eastward, on the way from Jaffa to Jeru- 
salem, now dotted with Jewish possessions, lay only Artuf, 
except Moza huddled close to Jerusalem. Northward Petah 
Tikwah, in Judea, together with the Samarian settlements 
Kafr Saba, Hederah, Zichron Jacob, and Athlit, linked Jaffa 
with Haifa. Isolated from all these, separated from them 
by the Carmel range, was a group of six in Galilee, Yesod 
ha-Maalah, Mishmar ha-Yarden, Eosh Pinnah, and En-Zeitun 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 43 

near the Waters of Merom, and the two lone outposts, Bene 
Jehudah eastward on the Sea of Tiberias, and Metullah north- 
ward. 

Since then Jewish settlement has advanced as far south- 
ward as Djemama, twenty-six miles beyond Kastinieh, and 
negotiations are said to be pending for large domains still 
further off, in the El-Arish region. But the northern limit of 
Jewish colonization has not yet been exceeded. That may be 
due to Metullah's peculiar trials. The neighbors of the settlers, 
workingmen like those of Kastinieh, were the Druses of the 
Lebanon district, who disputed Baron de Rothschild's title 
to the land, though he paid for it twice over. They were not 
gracious neighbors, to say the least, and besides Metullah was 
exposed constantly to the incursions of roving Bedouin tribes, 
more numerous here than in the southern Jewish district. 
That is not the whole tale of its trials. Again resembling 
its southern companion colony Kastinieh, Metullah confines 
itself to a single crop, cereals. It has neither vineyards nor 
orange plantations. In Palestine it is reckoned that for suc- 
cess with grain each family ought to have from sixty to 
seventy-five acres. Metullah and Kastinieh both fall short 
of the average. In the north the attempt was made to adjust 
the disproportion between population and space by transfer- 
ring, in 1899, fifteen of Metullah's sixty families to other 
colonies. The expedient had the disadvantage of weakening 
an exposed outpost. 

The history of the colonies so far as given above awakens 
two feelings : admiration for the zeal of the Odessa Committee, 
of Baron de Eothschild, and of the pioneer and martyr colo- 
nists ; and doubt whether the system pursued was not threaten- 



44 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



ing Palestine with a rural pauperization easily comparable 
with that caused by the Halukkah in the u holy cities." 

The doubt ought not to be allowed to harden into a convic- 
tion without a fair consideration of the difficulties in the way 
of adapting the European settler to an Asiatic environment, 
and at the same time transforming into a peasant the city-bred 
Jew, who has been an inbred city-dweller for generations. 

The fortunes of the colonists of Mishmar ha-Yarden are 
an epitome of the conditions encountered by all. Twenty-four 
men, all penniless, most of them having been workingmen 
for several years in the earlier colonies, secured a small 
piece of land on the Jordan, where it issues from the Sea of 
Merom. They acquired it on credit, and erected a few houses 
with borrowed money. As a writer puts it, the colony was 
" a knife without a blade that has no handle," and all that 
was necessary to insure the conditions for success, another 
says, was that someone be found to pay for the land and the 
houses, install the water works, provide the means for building 
more houses, for buying live stock, seeds, and implements, and 
for preparing the soil, not to mention the ready cash for the 
maintenance of the colonists until their farms yielded sufficient 
produce. 

If Mishmar ha-Yarden illustrates the general inadequacy of 
the means available for the colonization work, Hederah dwells 
in the mind of the Palestinian Jews as the symbol of misery, 
sacrifice, and grief. Its story is told by two mute witnesses, 
the cemetery at the not distant Zichron J acob and the somber 
groves of eucalyptus trees that shroud the beautifully situated 
colony on the Mediterranean dunes with spectral charm under 
the moonlit and star-studded sky of Syria. The whole terri- 
tory acquired by the inexperienced colonists was a marsh, due 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 45 



to the choking up of a near-by streamlet with the encroaching 
sand from the sea. Malaria carried off the larger part of the 
colonists in a few years. There was no change in the appalling 
situation until the colony was helped by Baron de Eothschild 
to plant 400,000 of the rapid-growing eucalyptus trees, Charles 
better's happy importation from Australia, which had already 
done effective service in drying out the noisome soil of Petah 
Tikwah, where a similar condition had existed. It is not a little 
significant of the character of the Jewish contribution to 
modern Palestine development that in Arabic parlance the 
eucalyptus is the " J eVs tree." 

The story of Ekron has additional points of interest : Baron 
de Eothschild brought eleven families from Lithuania and 
seven from Eoumania, the first Palestinian colonists equipped 
with a knowledge of agriculture. It was due partly to their 
religious fidelity that Ekron nevertheless succeeded no better 
than the other colonies. In the fifth year of its existence oc- 
curred the Shemittah, the Sabbatical year. The observance 
of the Biblical law of the Seventh Year of Eelease crippled the 
farmers in Ekron as well as in other colonies. But that they 
did not retrieve their fortunes had another reason. The Eoths- 
child " administrator," to use the Palestinian term, changed 
the crop from grain to fruit. Without investigating condi- 
tions thoroughly, he supposed that the former required more 
area than the colony had had allotted to it. The Eussian 
farmers had however understood the cultivation of grain, and 
of plantations they knew nothing. 

Though the administrator was mistaken in the case of 
Ekron, it happens that these two points, the crop and in- 
sufficient land, were of the utmost importance. They explain 
why Baron de Eothschild's generosity did not compensate foi 



46 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



the colonists' initial poverty. Almost everywhere the mistake 
was made of adopting a single crop. That caused absolute 
destitution in the years unfavorable to that crop whatever it 
might be. Besides, it meant lack of employment for man and 
beast during a considerable part of the year, and therefore was 
not economical. And when the only crop was vines, as in 
practically all the colonies under the Eothschild administra- 
tion, a bountiful vintage was almost as disastrous as blight 
and dearth. 

Eishon le-Zion was the most notable victim of the question- 
able policy. Ten men, augmented soon to seventeen, bought 
758 acres of land. The cost of installation was excessive, 
because water had to be brought from a distance, and the 
soil was not adapted to grain, with which the colonists 
started out. Baron de Rothschild, it will be recalled, 
saved the colony. He increased its landed possessions to 1894 
acres, and a large part was planted with a million native vines, 
which, when it appeared that the Arab wines had small value 
in the market, were grafted with French varieties, sauterne, 
malaga, and muscatel. Wine-cellars were built, with the most 
modern appliances and with a capacity of 50,000 hectoliters 
(1,320,000 gallons). Except that the wine-cellars were of 
more moderate proportions, the same course was adopted at 
Zichron Jacob and Rosh Pinnah, and, encouraged by the assur- 
ance that the " administration 99 would buy whatever was pro- 
duced, Wady el-Hanin, Rehobot, Katra, and Hederah, though 
not under the Rothschild regime, followed their example. The 
production turned out enormous, as much as a million and 
a half gallons a year. In the meantime no measures had 
been taken to assure sales abroad. The country itself has a 
small rate of consumption due to the Moslem religious prohibi- 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 47 

tion of wine. Capacious as the cellars were, they were filled 
literally to overflowing, and the wine had to be sold by the 
managers for whatever price could be secured. What could 
be got, would not have sufficed to support the wine-growers, 
and Baron de Eothschild felt constrained to continue to buy 
the produce and to pay a living price, no matter what the 
market rates might be. The price fixed upon was $2.50 a 
hectoliter (26.4 gallons). Millions were thus poured into 
the colonies — with the result that private initiative was 
paralyzed, and a grave situation created that called for heroic 
remedies. 

It is futile to debate whether this baneful disregard of 
economic health was due to Baron de Kothschild's devotion to 
a pet scheme or to his administrators' lack of agronomic 
experience and business ability. In these respects they seem 
to have rivaled the colonists themselves. On the whole per- 
haps the plight of the colonists is attributable to inexperi- 
ence. As Hederah and Petah Tikwah prove, no one realized 
the need of guarding against unsanitary surroundings in 
securing land for a new group; and all the colonies prove 
that no one troubled to investigate the land laws, which are 
peculiarly intricate in Turkey. Confusion worse confounded 
was the consequence, not to mention the bitterness of the 
colonists, who often thought they had been betrayed in the 
house of their friends. On grounds not unconvincing the 
colonists did not consider the Eothschild administrators their 
well-wishers or the well-wishers of the Jewish movement, 
which was the breath of their nostrils. The taxes were oppres- 
sive to boot, sparing not even fruit-trees, and what they did 
not consume, was exposed to depredation in a country inade- 
quately policed. 



48 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



Beyond these, reasons need not be multiplied for the asser- 
tion that in 1899 all bnt the ever-optimistic Jew would have 
been discouraged by the outlook. 

THE RURAL DEVELOPMENT 

SECOND PERIOD OF JEWISH COLONIZATION 
1900-1914 

Ahad Ha-Am's Criticism — Baron de Rothschild and the ICA — 
Reorganization of Wine Production — Wine-Growers Syndicate 
— Destruction of Vineyards — Carmel Society — Criticism of 
ICA Policy — Effect of the Crisis — Cereals and Plantations — 
Petah Tikwah: Orange Plantations — Pardess — Guaranteed 
Loans — Anglo-Palestine Bank: Co-operative Associations — 
National Fund — Long-Term Credits — Education of Farmers: 
Preparation of Land — Labor Problem — The ICA Educa- 
tional Work — Sedjera — Other Lower Galilean Colonies — Reho- 
bot: Menuhah we-Nahalah — Arab Labor — Housing Problem — 
Workingmen's Suburbs — Co-operative Workingmen's Associa- 
tions — Merhawiah — Land Development Companies — Geulah — 
Agudat Netaim — Palestine Land Development Company — Ha- 
Ahuzah — Zion Commonwealth — Settlement and Occupancy — 
Kewuzot-Kibbush — Reafforestation — Industrial Settlement and 
Farm School — Mikweh Israel — Agricultural College at Petah 
Tikwah — Girls' Farm School, Kinneret — Agricultural Train- 
ing in the Village Schools — Stipends in California — Jewish 
Agricultural Experiment Station — Land Cultivated by Jews. 

These strictures are not the wisdom of hindsight. Criticism 
along the same lines was heard in all interested circles after 
the first few years of colonization. As early as 1891, Ahad 
Ha-Am (Asher Ginzberg), the noted Hebrew writer, one of 
the leading spirits of the Odessa Committee, went to Palestine 
to see with his own eyes what there was to be seen. On his 
return he urged the adoption of two principles : The centrali- 
zation of all purchases of land as well as of the whole coloniza- 
tion work ; and a change from the rather commercialized wine- 
growing system to the cultivation of grain in connection with 
cattle-raising and poultry-keeping. 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 49 

The demand for centralization anticipated a condition that 
arose that very year, a year of expulsions in Eussia. A large 
number of colonization groups had formed themselves. Each 
sent its own representative to Palestine to buy land. There 
ensued unworthy competition, speculation in land, and deplor- 
able manifestations of other sorts. One result was the Turk- 
ish Government's prohibition against Eussian Jewish immi- 
gration and the renewal of the prohibition against selling 
land to Eussian Jews. 

Ahad Ha-Am's second journey to Palestine, in 1893, pro- 
duced two guiding principles for the action of the Odessa Com- 
mittee: No step to be taken in Palestine without the open 
approval of the Turkish Government; and no aid to be given 
to colonists in the shape of money— all assistance to take the 
form of implements, and even this to be accorded as sparingly 
as possible. 

Finally, his third investigation, in 1899, in which he was 
aided by a trained agronomist, yielded the advice : Introduce 
diversified crops ; engage adepts to study the land laws ; avoid 
giving assistance to individuals — it blights the will and 
paralyzes the power of initiative. 

It is not necessary to assume that Ahad Ha-Am's findings 
influenced Baron de Eothschild. He must have been made 
aware in many other ways of the maladministration of his 
unmeasured gifts. It is also reasonable to suppose that he 
was discouraged by fifteen years of what then seemed incon- 
sequential experimenting, though later developments show 
the early period to have been a profitable time of seed-sowing. 
At all events, Baron de Eothschild saw fit to transfer all his 
interests in the Palestine colonies, together, it is said, with a 
goodly sum for their reconstruction, to the Jewish Coloniza- 



50 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



tion Association (ICA), the Baron Maurice de Hirsch Founda- 
tion. But this business arrangement has made no change in 
Baron de Bothschild's personal interest in Palestine. It con- 
tinues unabated to the present time. 

The work of reorganizing the Bothschild colonies was begun 
forthwith. First of all it was announced that the inflated 
prices paid for wines would have to be reduced by half at 
least. The effect on the colonists may be imagined. They 
had become accustomed to the pleasant security of the un- 
wavering price promised to them whatever the fluctuations of 
the market might be. In good years the seven wine-growing 
colonies had produced over a million and a half gallons, for 
which $172,500 had been paid by the Bothschild " administra- 
tion." In future the income was to be variable and at best 
half as large. The paramount task thus became the creation 
of a real instead of a fictitious market for their chief, in many 
instances their only, product, and until genuine sales could 
be negotiated, the most urgent measure was a reduction of 
the output. 

The problem was solved, naturally not without a good deal 
of painful bloodletting, by the ICA in co-operation with the 
wine-growers that had been sending their grapes to the cellars. 
The latter formed a syndicate of 352 members, giving pro- 
portional representation to Bishon le-Zion, Behobot, Zichron 
Jacob, Katra, Petah Tikwah, and Wady el-Hanin. This corn- 
pan}'' took over the management of the wine-cellars, which it 
] eased for a nominal rent. It was to pay in easy installments 
for the wine stored in the cellars and reimburse Baron de 
Bothschild for the outstanding claims. In addition it received 
as a gift a reserve fund of $320,000, from which current deficits 
were to be covered for five years. 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 51 



To reduce the output, many vineyards had to be sacrificed. 
About thirty per cent of the acreage in vines in all the wine- 
growing colonies was cleared. The colonists received a bonus 
for the uprooted plants out of the reserve fund, with the under- 
standing that the cleared area be used for other plantations. 
In Rishon le-Zion it amounted to $18,400. In this way the 
production was reduced by nearly three-fifths of the former 
maximum. As it happens, the phylloxera aided the cutting- 
down process, though in some places the infected French 
vines were replaced by American plants. The expenses of the 
administration of the wine-cellars were rigidly cut down, and 
the agencies established in Egypt and in European countries 
were reorganized. In a few years the syndicate, whose official 
name is Societe co-operative vigneronne des grandes caves de 
Rischon le-Zion et Zichron Jacob, secured for its members a 
bona fide price of $1.60 a hectoliter. To this 75 cents per 
hectoliter was added from the reserve fund to make up for the 
shortage ir> the receipts. Now the production was again 
allowed to rise, and in 1911-1912 it had reached nearly 
1,100,000 gallons as compared with 900,000 in 1910, and 
650,000 at the time of lowest production. The whole output 
was disposed of in 1911, over 350,000 gallons being sold in 
Egypt, 300,000 in the rest of the Orient, and the balance, 
about 400,000, in Switzerland, France, Eussia, Germany, 
America, and Galicia. In the same year the co-operative 
society was able to pay to Baron de Eothschild the sum of 
$90,000 as the first installment of its debt, and in 1912-1913, 
the vintage handled by the company had a value of at least 
$200,000. Another indication of a wise business policy is the 
fact that besides wines and cognacs the growers turned their 
attention to by-products, like cream of tartar, and in the wake 



52 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



of the more independent attitude has come an opener mind 
for new industries, such as the cultivation of grapes for table 
uses, either as fresh grapes or as raisins, for both of which 
Egypt offers an almost never-failing market. 

A large part of the success achieved by the co-operative 
society must be attributed to the company that acts as its 
selling agent, the Carmel, with branches in Russia, the United 
States, Turkey and Egypt, Germany, England, and France. 

In a word, the co-operative society is a remarkably vigorous 
expression of the self-reliant spirit that pervades the recent 
colonization period in contrast with the former. 

It should be mentioned that on the scientific side the radical 
procedure of the ICA has not received unqualified endorse- 
ment. There are experts that hold Baron de Rothschild's un- 
trained instinct to have been the surer guide. Palestine, they 
maintain, is primarily adapted for vine plantations. If it was 
a mistaken policy from the economic point of view to con- 
centrate upon them too intensively at the outset, it was a head- 
long policy to uproot what had been planted. A betterment 
might have been effected in other ways. Against which the 
economists hold up the difficulties inherent in the situation 
over and above those 'of competition with the wines of other 
countries. There is first the circumstance that home consump- 
tion is bound to be small in a Moslem country. Then there is 
the problem of transportation from the colonies to the port 
of Jaffa. This the co-operative society has already tackled. 
It has put the sum of $21,600 at the disposal of Rehobot for 
constructing a wagon-road to Rishon le-Zion, and $8000 at 
the disposal of the latter for a similar road to connect it 
with the Jaffa- Jerusalem Railroad, together making about 
9^ miles of highway, the two colonies to undertake to keep 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 53 



their respective roads in repair once they are built. Incident- 
ally it may be said that road-making for wagon travel is a 
cultural value created in Palestine almost exclusively by the 
Jew. 

The third disadvantage connected with wine-growing is the 
high tax imposed upon the product, 15$ on the wine plus the 
regular tithe (osher) on the grapes. In one year the co- 
operative society paid $27,000 in imposts to the Government. 
The friends of Turkey are confident that, she will continue 
the modernization of her fiscal system already begun, and then 
the force of this third objection against wine-growing will be 
lessened. 

The I OA's precaution of paying a bonus did not avert either 
a moral or a material crisis. The change from the philan- 
thropic to the business basis, coupled with a reversal of the 
agricultural policy, was a surgical operation bound to leave 
a scar. A number of the Eothschild proteges could not recon- 
cile themselves to the new order. Ill-feeling developed, and 
here and there old bonds had to be ruptured. Only in the 
course of the years has the temper changed. Few can be found 
to-day to deny that, whatever may be thought of the incident, 
the altered outlook has been salutary. 

Eegulating the wine production was only one half of the 
ICA's work of reconstruction in the old Eothschild colonies. 
The denuded lands had to be replanted. The experts sug- 
gested orange and almond plantations, fruits for which a 
market existed, and grain cultivation, which carries with it 
the breeding of cattle and incidentally the production of man- 
ure. But all the proposals presented difficulties in the execu- 
tion. Wheat, barley, sesame, and other grains call for soil of 
a specific kind. Where the colony did not own land adapted 



54 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



to them, such had to be bought. Cattle needs fodder, and 
the colonists had to be taught its production and care. Plants 
to be used as fertilizers ought to be cultivated to supplement 
the animal manure. That, too, was a new undertaking for 
the colonists. As for orange-growing, it cannot be done with- 
out irrigation and motor service. Moreover new fruit planta- 
tions do not yield at once. An orange-tree bears at the end 
of three years, but a full crop only in the seventh. Almond- 
trees bring forth copiously in their fifth year, the installation 
required is cheaper than with oranges, and the fruit is not so 
perishable. For olive-trees the unproductive period ranges 
from five to twelve years according to the method of propaga- 
tion, but they have compensating advantages : their fruit has 
many uses and by-products ; while the other plantations must 
be renewed at comparatively short intervals, an olive-tree is 
known to bear for longer than a century ; and it can be planted 
in all sorts of soil — when one sees it clinging to rocky preci- 
pices, one is inclined to believe that it can grow where there 
is no soil at all. 

Land, power, and time, all are the equivalents of money, 
and the colonists had none. The bonus paid for the extermi- 
nated vines supplied it in small part. Where it did not meet 
the situation, the ICA was prepared to advance money as a 
guaranteed loan, to individual colonists and to groups. In 
this way Rishon le-Zion came to be an orange, almond, and 
olive, as well as a wine-producing colony. Rosh Pinnah gave 
up wine altogether, and devoted itself to almonds, grain, and 
cattle. Zichron Jacob, with its daughter settlements, Shefeya, 
Bat Shelomoh, Marah, Herbet Mendjie, and Bourdj, raises 
grain, vegetables, cattle, wine, almonds, and olives, and at 
Nesly near-by the ICA itself has a remarkable orange-grove. 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 55 



In Ekron there was a complete return to grain, for which the 
farm and the farmers were best adapted, while Katra on ac- 
count of its soil stuck to vineyards, and only added almonds 
in order not to be dependent wholly on one sort of crop. 
Lately it has planted 714 acres in grain. 

The checkered history of Petah Tikwah illustrates important 
points in the development of the Palestine colonies that are 
pertinent here. It will be recalled that it was started by some 
Jews from Jerusalem in 1878. They bought 692 acres of land 
to the north of Jaffa in an Arab village. Their neighbors 
proved troublesome and dangerous. Almost at once they were 
forced to the expedient of buying the whole village, increasing 
their possessions to 2466 acres. The sale of the parcels of land 
to others proceeded slowly, and the proximity of the Audje 
River, with its marshy banks, caused disease, particularly 
malaria. A remnant of the little group moved to Jehudieh, 
less than two miles distant. Meantime members of the Rus- 
sian colonization societies bought land from the original owners 
in Petah Tikwah proper, only to experience the same dangers 
and difficulties. They struggled along until 1887, when Baron 
de Rothschild acquired a large part, nearly half, of the lands of 
the colony, settled twenty-eight workingmen and their families 
on his property, and so reinforced the remnant of the Jeru- 
salem and Russian settlers. The cultivation of grain was 
abandoned largely for grapes in 1891, and about eighty Jewish 
workingmen from the outside and from among the least 
prosperous of the colonists were employed in the vineyards. 
It was made obligatory upon the Rothschild settlers to plant a 
certain number of eucalyptus trees as a measure against 
malaria, and the sandy parts of the land were given up to 
plantations, chiefly oranges, requiring irrigation. The first 
2 



56 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



orange-grove was planted by the Kothschild administration in 
1892. Two years later this example was followed by settlers 
with sufficient capital of their own. The fortunes of the colony 
were thus decided. It has been developing steadily since then, 
with only a slight set-back at the time of the wine crisis. On 
account of the varied crops in Petah Tikwah, the transition 
from the one stage to the next was attended with less painful 
readjustments than elsewhere, and in the increasing popula- 
tion the " Rothschild colonists " imparted less of their philan- 
thropic character to the settlement. Petah Tikwah in a word 
was approximately normal. 

The orange plantations nourished and multiplied. The 
whole garden city is now encircled by them. In 1912 the 
acreage in oranges was 1198, compared with 1202 in almonds, 
250 in wine, 122 in olives, 23 in other fruit trees (apricots, 
peaches, etc.), and 41 in eucalyptus trees, the whole extent of 
the colony being 5417 acres. The eucalyptus timber is be- 
ginning to be used as building material, for fuel, and especially 
for props in the plantations, which until recently had to be 
imported. To some extent the colonists are destroying the 
trees, because they are no longer needed for sanitary reasons, 
or because other and more efficacious measures against malaria 
have been introduced. The colony indulges in experiments, too. 
There is an ostrich farm, the rose geranium is cultivated for 
the aromatic oil it contains, attention is given to rubber and 
bamboo and bananas as possible crops, and the experience 
gained in planting cotton there and elsewhere is being utilized 
now by the Tiberias Land and Plantation Company, which in 
1910 acquired about 1100 acres at Medjdel on the Sea of 
Tiberias, largely for the purpose of testing the value of Egypt's 
product for Palestine. 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 57 



To return to the orange production of Petah Tikwah: In 
1911 its yield was 122.156 boxes of about 150 oranges each, as 
compared with 168.088 for all Jewish plantations in Palestine. 
The most recent figures for the whole of Palestine, Arab, 
Jewish, and German, are 1.553,000 boxes, one-third of which 
come from Jewish plantations. This should be compared with 
the 448.000 boxes in 1903. The whole output has been taken 
hitherto by Liverpool, Trieste, Odessa, Hamburg, and Aus- 
tralia, the thick skin of the seedless J aff a, or Shamuti, orange 
making transportation to distant points feasible. 

As Kishon le-Zion became the center of the wine-trade, not 
only by reason of its vineyards, but equally on account of the 
business organization that regulates production and distribu- 
tion, so Petah Tikwah owes some of its prosperity to the Par- 
dess, the union of Jewish orange-grove owners, which concerns 
itself with the exportation of the orange crop. The ICA, own- 
ing considerable orange plantations in Petah Tikwah, was one 
of the founders. In the early days the Jewish orange-growers 
were wholly dependent on the Arab dealers in Jaffa, who 
monopolized the foreign trade. The Jewish growers were 
thus not in a position to shape the trade conditions, the 
camel transportation to the port, the shipments, and the sales. 
Through co-operation the Jewish growers established their own 
sales-agencies abroad, secured control over shipping facilities 
and wharf privileges, and so lessened the expenses and in- 
creased the profits of the growers considerably. Latterly a 
second such organization, the Union, has been formed. The 
inspection of the fruit and its packing for the foreign markets 
have improved under the co-operative system, and a favorable 
development along these lines may be expected. 



58 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



A comprehensive idea of Petah Tikwah's standing may be 
gained from the fact that in 1912, it paid taxes to the State to 
the amount of $13,002, and taxed itself for its internal affairs 
in the sum of $16,793. 

The activity of the ICA in granting guaranteed loans intro- 
duces a subject of fundamental importance. It does not 
require colonization work in Palestine to prove the need of 
long-term credits for an agrarian population. It is a com- 
monplace of financial economy. The unique feature in Pales- 
tine was the confusion introduced into the whole idea of credit 
through the Eothschild system, imitated in a measure by the 
Odessa Committee, of dispensing charity in the guise of per- 
petual loans. Beneficent as the ICA methods were in their 
impersonal business character, the real education of the people 
in monetary relations was begun only in 1903, when the 
Zionist Organization, through its financial instrument, the 
Jewish Colonial Trust, Ltd., established, at Jaffa, a subsidiary 
institution, the Anglo-Palestine Co., Ltd., for all sorts of 
banking business. In the course of twelve years branches 
have been opened in Jerusalem, Haifa, Beirut, Safed, Tiberias, 
and Hebron. It has at present a working capital of $500,000, 
a sum not large enough to meet the needs of a farming popu- 
lation. Happily expedients have been found to increase the 
usefulness of the bank in its peculiar Palestinian environ- 
ment. 

Almost at once the Anglo-Palestine Bank began to exert a 
salutary influence. It distributed leaflets in the colonies treat- 
ing of the value of self-help in the form of co-operative asso- 
ciations. The propaganda took immediate effect in Petah 
Tikwah, where, in 1904, two co-operative or mutual loan asso- 
ciations were founded. In 1912 the number of such societies, 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 59 



including those which sprang up in the cities as well as the 
colonies, had grown to 45, with 1833 members, working with 
a capital of $21,000 (of which the Odessa Committee contri- 
buted $10,000), and having a debt of $186,813 (of which 
$99,500 is owing to the Anglo-Palestine Company) . The loans 
run from $2 to $600. In addition to mutual loan associations, 
there are in the colonies co-operative societies for the purchase 
of fodder. The Anglo-Palestine Company has been endeavor- 
ing to stimulate the founding of co-operative stores, in which it 
has succeeded to some extent, and of co-operative societies for 
the sale of natural products on the model of the Wine-Growers 
Association and the Pardess. There also exist co-operative 
building associations, of which something will be said when the 
subject of urban development is reached. 

At the opening of the bank, only short-term credits lay 
within its plan. In spite of the peculiar complications in- 
herent in the Turkish law governing mortgages and the owner- 
ship and sale of land, it has since adopted a system of well- 
guaranteed long-term credits, so grave a need in house-building 
and in developing plantations. 

The second financial instrument of the Zionist organization 
has come to the aid of the bank in its self-help campaign. The 
Jewish National Fund was founded in 1901, with the purpose 
— still its primary purpose — of purchasing land in Palestine 
as the inalienable possession of the Jewish people. Once a foot 
of land is acquired by the Fund, it cannot be sold — good 
Jewish doctrine according to Leviticus 25:23: "The land 
shall not be sold in perpetuity ; for the land is Mine." It may 
only be leased, though as an hereditary leasehold, the rent 
not to exceed 3$ of the value of the land if used for agricul- 
tural purposes, and 4$ if used for building purposes. This 



60 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



system naturally requires revaluations of the land from time 
to time. Its advantages are that land speculation is cut off, 
the intending settler is saved the cost of the land, and can use 
in immediately productive ways such capital as he may have. 

As the Fund is intended to benefit the people at large, so it 
has flowed from the people, through various channels of self- 
taxation. The collections of the first year and a half yielded 
$98,000; those of 1913, ten years later, $200,000. Its assets 
(June, 1914) amount to about $1,018,000, of which, according 
to its statutes, one-fourth must constitute a reserve fund. 

The purpose of the National Fund, if executed as at first con- 
ceived, to the exclusion of all else, would have been nullified by 
a provision of the Turkish law, whereby lancl left unworked for 
three years reverts as a rule to the State. The volume and the 
character of Jewish immigration to Palestine were not yet 
such as to secure large possessions against reversion. The 
National Fund policy therefore had to be modified, from the 
vantage point of a generation's experience with Jewish coloni- 
zation. In turn, the modification required by the Ottoman 
law furthered one of the objects of the Zionist movement, viz., 
to organize and regulate the emigration of Jews who desire to 
settle in Palestine. This calls for a program on which a place 
must be given to all the problems affecting the Jewish settler 
on the land. 

Accordingly, pending the creation of an agrarian bank, it 
fell easily within the scope of the National Fund to help the 
solution of the long-term credit question. Out of its various 
investments in Palestine, amounting to $687,004, it has made 
a loan deposit of $63,904 with the Anglo-Palestine Bank for 
house-building credits, and one of $28,227 for agrarian credits. 
In pursuance of the same policy, it has advanced $53,855 to 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 61 



the Palestine Land Development Company, and $9000 to the 
Odessa Committee for objects to be described further on. 

The credit situation is not an isolated problem in Palestine 
colonization. As implied above, the occupation of land ac- 
quired is imperative. Again, the early colonization period 
taught as its chief lesson that the Jewish forces coming to 
Palestine require severe training to fit them for the pioneer 
work to be done. By way of compensation, the history of 
Eehobot, which has not yet been told here, proves that the 
fine spirit of devotion animating the untrained forces need 
not be left unutilized. If they cannot be prepared to grapple 
with the difficulties of the situation, then the land can be 
prepared so as to minimize the difficulties. The education 
of the human material looks to the creation of a farmer or 
peasant class ; the amelioration of the land, largely to the crea- 
tion of a rural settler class. 

There remains one more problem, and that perhaps the most 
complex. From the start there had been in rural Palestine a 
specific and varied Jewish labor problem. The Arab laborer 
with his low standard of living was far cheaper than the Jewish 
laborer ; he lived near-by, and could be had in season, and in- 
continently dismissed out of season, a manifest advantage on 
plantations and on farms with a single crop; and above 
all his housing presented no perplexities. This explains why 
of the many thousands of Jewish young men who went to 
Palestine with high hopes of independence, only about 1500 
(with their families 4000) are left. And it explains partly why 
so large a proportion of the early settlers of Zichron Jacob, 
Eishon le-Zion, and Petah Tikwah, did not become the genuine 
peasants needed at the foundation of a normal life. Between 



62 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



cheap Arab labor and philanthropic pampering the sturdiest of 
them reached only the stage of the gentleman farmer. 

To these three questions — credit giving, the education of the 
farmer, and the labor situation — the ICA, the Odessa Com- 
mittee, and the Zionist Organization addressed themselves in 
whole or in part, and various societies were formed to deal with 
their several specific phases. 

First as to the ICA's contribution : During the early coloni- 
zation period Baron de Eothschild had made large purchases of 
land in Lower Galilee, which had been leased to Arabs to pre- 
vent reversion to the State. The ICA increased these posses- 
sions until the tracts in Jewish hands in the Tiberias region 
amounted to 25,000 acres. In 1898, even before the ICA 
assumed the management of the Eothschild properties, it 
established a farm at Sedjera, at the foot of Mount Tabor. An 
administration building was erected with barracks, stables, and 
outhouses; Jewish workingmen were employed, and under 
expert supervision wheat and barley were planted, cattle was 
bred, and poultry raised, special attention being given to the 
important and hitherto largely neglected subject of manures 
and other fertilizers. The Arabs of the adjacent village were 
called upon to instruct the Jewish laborers, among whom there 
were a few women. 

Two years later the colony of Sedjera was laid out, in parcels 
of about seventy acres, in closest proximity to the farm of the 
same name. The land was leased mainly to the workers trained 
at the farm. The rent was paid in kind, 20$ of the gross 
produce. A lessee who demonstrated his qualifications could in 
the course of a few years expect to make a definitive agreement 
with the ICA whereby the capital represented by the farm, 
bearing interest at 2$, was to be paid off in 51 years. The 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 63 



investments, including the cost of the land, the house and the 
stable, the implements, the cattle and the horses, and mainte- 
nance until the first crops were harvested, varied from $2200 to 
$3580. In front of each house was a patch of ground for 
vegetables, from which the colonists supplied their own table 
and occasionally drew a small revenue. Supplementary re- 
ceipts also came from tobacco, potatoes, and small olive planta- 
tions. The most valuable feature was the stress laid on cattle- 
raising from the point of view of manure for the fields and 
of dairy products for use at home and for sale in the town of 
Tiberias. The colony, like others, suffered through the 
diseases attacking the cattle. The practical result will be, on 
the one hand, the organization of a cattle insurance system, 
and on the other, measures for enforcing a sort of quarantine 
against the cattle of the Arab neighbors. 

During the next two years Mesha, Yemma, and Milhamieh 
were established in the same way, in the Tiberias region, and 
in the period 1904 to 1908 followed Bedjen, Kinneret, and 
Mizpah. In all these little centers the workingmen trained 
at Sedjera proved better colonizing material than the early 
settlers, of whom some had been brought to Lower Galilee 
from older colonies suffering, like Metullah, from scarcity of 
land. The ICA is prepared, however, to welcome to these 
colonies settlers from the outside, provided they are equipped 
with some knowledge of farming, and have a capital of at 
least $1000. To such it sells parcels of land, improved or 
unimproved, on easy terms. 

In outline this is the ICA's credit and educational system. 

The history of Eehobot affords an illuminating introduction 
to the enterprises of the Odessa Committee and the National 
Fund that were also designed to meet the situation character- 



64 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



ized above. In 1890 various groups of Jews bought a strip of 
territory to the south of Eishon le-Zion. The largest of the 
groups consisted of fifty-five persons, members of a Warsaw 
colonization society, Menuhah we-Nahalah. For a time the 
land was managed jointly, and only after the plantations of 
vines and almond-trees had begun to bear, those of the owners 
who were actually in Palestine took full possession of their 
allotments. Eehobot suffered from the wine crisis like the rest. 
But its recovery has been thoroughgoing, and at present it 
ranks high among the prosperous colonies. In none have there 
been so many J ewish workingmen employed from first to last. 
Three hundred were there at the start, and provision was made 
for them in barracks, where they dwelt and messed together. 
By 1895 it is said several thousand workingmen had come and 
gone. The grafting and other such work were finished in the 
plantations, and the high-priced, intelligent labor of the Jew 
could be dispensed with. Wages were lowered, the barracks 
became uninhabitable through neglect, and the mess was 
abolished. At the same time, foodstuffs had risen in price 
through conditions not affecting Arab labor. It was impossible 
for the Jews to stay on. They furnished the colonists for 
Kastinieh and other places. 

The two points to be noted here are the cultivation of the 
land before the owners took it over definitely, and the relation 
of the Jewish workingman to the planter on the one side and 
the Arab laborer on the other. 

In the colonies of Eishon le-Zion, Petah Tikwah, Katra, 
Zichron Jacob, and Eehobot, there are upwards of five thousand 
Arab laborers. Some of these actually live in the Jewish 
villages, which largely depend upon the Arab markets for milk, 
eggs, vegetables, and garden produce. The situation is not 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 65 

healthy on social and economic grounds. Yet it is not rea- 
sonable to suppose that the planters are going to seek labor 
in the dearest instead of the cheapest market. 

In the earlier colonization period, the solution resorted to, 
so far as the Jewish laborers per se were concerned, was to 
settle workingmen's colonies, like Kastinieh and Metullah, 
though with the fairly certain prospect that new difficulties 
were bound to result from insufficient land and capital. In 
the second period it was discerned that a fundamental trouble 
was the housing question. If Jewish laborers could be provided 
with dwellings within already established colonies, an ap- 
proximate equalization would be brought about between the 
Arab laborer and the Jewish workingman. And if, moreover, 
his house could be surrounded with a garden plot from the 
cultivation of which he and especially his wife would eke 
out the current wage with the sale of market produce, a con- 
siderable improvement would be effected. 

The providing of dwellings became a burning problem with 
the advent of the Yemenites. It will be recalled that two 
thousand of them arrived in Palestine in two years, and were 
diverted from the cities to the colonies. Industrious and 
frugal, speaking both Arabic and Hebrew, their wives ready to 
replace the Arab women in domestic service, the Yemenites 
were recognized especially by the plantation colonies as valu- 
able accessions, worth making an effort for. And what they 
needed was houses — they cried constantly, " Battim, battim." 

It is natural, then, that the Odessa Committee, the Ezra of 
Berlin, and the National Fund should have turned their atten- 
tion to workingmen's dwellings, with the result that various 
expedients have been adopted. Where the arriving Yemenites 
were exposed to the inclemency of the weather, and haste was 



66 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



more imperative than permanence, or where unmarried work- 
ingmen needed accommodations, the National Fund erected 
barracks. The Ezra, which calls itself a Society for the 
Support of J ews Pursuing Agriculture in Palestine and Syria, 
put up small family houses, five in Eehobot and ten in 
Hederah, to which the National Fund has added five in 
Eohobot, five in Petah Tikwah, three in Eishon le-Zion, and 
two in Wady el-Hanin. The barracks for unmarried men 
on the National Fund farms and in Hederah and Petah 
Tikwah have bedrooms for three occupants, a kitchen, a 
dining-room, and a little library. For Yemenites in par- 
ticular the National Fund built five houses at Yemma, five 
at Wady el-Hanin, and three in Eehobot, in the last place in 
addition to the twelve put up by the colony itself for its 
Yemenite workers. Besides, the National Fund founded two 
little Yemenite settlements, one of twenty houses, called 
Nahliel, on the outskirts of Hederah, and one of thirty 
houses, called Mahaneh Jehudah, near Petah Tikwah. The 
Yemenites are favorable to settlements of their own; they 
afford them the opportunity for a community life with their 
own religious coloring. The houses, no matter by whom built, 
have more or less of a plot of ground attached to them for 
vegetable gardening on a small scale. The National Fund has 
erected in all fifty-eight houses and thirteen barracks, with the 
moneys of its specific Workingmen's Homes Fund (Arbeiter- 
heimstattenfond) and of special funds donated to it by indi- 
viduals. 

The Odessa Committee has developed the idea of working- 
men's homes in another direction. It has established three 
workingmen's settlements, one accessible from Petah Tikwah, 
and two accessible, though not easily so, from Eishon le-Zion. 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 67 

These workingmen's settlements are not to be confused with 
the workingmen's colonies of the previous period, like Kas- 
tinieh and Metullah. They are intended for settlements in 
which the day-laborers employed in the colony proper may 
establish an attractive home for less than is possible in the 
colony itself, in which land prices are high. The houses are 
surrounded by considerable ground for garden purposes. The 
terms of payment are easy, and the proximity to the large 
colony is an advantage in respect to schools and other com- 
munal institutions. 

The Odessa Committee was, it seems, wholly successful in 
executing its idea in En-Gannim, about fifteen minutes' walk 
from Petah Tikwah, where all the settlers are sure of finding 
employment. It promises to be equally successful with its 
newest (1913) venture, of a slightly different character, at 
Nahalat Jehudah near Eishon le-Zion. Provision is there to 
be made for three sorts of settlers : farmers who desire to sup- 
port themselves by intensive farming on a plot of less than 
two acres after the pattern of a California project; working- 
men employed in the wine-cellars, who want a house and 
garden ; and Yemenites for whom the National Fund will care 
in its usual way. 

But two similar undertakings, one at Bir Jacob, a little 
removed from Eishon le-Zion, the other at Kafr Saba, still 
further removed from Petah Tikwah, the first fathered by the 
Odessa Committee, the second by the Ezra, are less likely 
to bring about the intended result. Both are too far from the 
main colony for the settlers to depend upon it for daily em- 
ployment, except the twelve in Kafr Saba to whom it has been 
guaranteed. Besides, the history of the persons in the settle- 
ments points to their being incipient planters rather than 



68 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



workingmen in the real sense of the word. The development 
here approximates the spirit in the earlier period, except that 
the credit given is a genuine loan, and not a benefaction in the 
guise of a loan. 

The privileges of these " suburban " settlements are offered 
on the basis of long-term loans at low rates of interest and 
repayments in small installments, with specially favorable 
arrangements for the Yemenites, whose houses are constructed 
on the simplest plan, and as a rule are built on National Fund 
properties. The improvements can be acquired by them, but 
not the land on which they stand. In En-Gannim the plot was 
secured by the Odessa Committee from the Geulah, a land 
company organized as early as 1902 by Eussian Jews. 

The movement for workingmen's houses in all forms dates 
only from 1908. In so far as generalizations may be based on 
so short a period, it may be asserted that the repayments on the 
loans are satisfactory, the Yemenites having won an especially 
good record for promptitude. 

This Odessa and Ezra method of establishing workingmen's 
suburbs is limited in application. It addresses itself only 
to workingmen with families, specifically such as have some 
capital, or at all events a reasonable assurance of a steady 
livelihood, and it does not go beyond the housing question as 
such. It leaves out of account all the other phases of the 
workingman's problem in Palestine. The National Fund 
goes a step further in developing conditions favorable to a 
sturdy, self-reliant immigration. Having provided barracks 
for the unmarried recent immigrant, come to seek, if not his 
fortune, certainly his happiness in the Holy Land, it realizes 
that, once such immigrants are secured to Palestine, they 
should see before them the possibility of rising in the economic 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 69 



scale as rural settlers and of establishing a family. With a 
view to this, the National Fund has recently adopted the expe- 
dient of leasing to co-operative workingmen's associations its 
estates at Merhawiah, Daganiah, and Kinneret in the north, 
Hulda and Ben Shamen on the Jaffa-Jerusalem road, Kas- 
tinieh in the south, and Gan Shemuel, the orange and etrogim 
grove planted in memory of Eabbi Mohilewer, near Hederah. 
Latterly the ICA farm at Sedjera has also been given over to 
such a co-operative association. 

The estate of Merhawiah just mentioned cannot be dismissed 
summarily. It is the scene of an interesting experiment — 
events may prove it to be one of capital importance. The estate, 
of eight hundred acres lies in the Valley of Jezreel, famous 
for its luscious fertility and as the battleground of the hosts 
of Assyria and Egypt. Soon Merhawiah (Afule) will be a 
prominent station on the Haifa-Nablus-Jerusalem Eailroad, 
nearing completion. The National Fund leased 682 acres of 
this estate to the Erez Israel Colonization Association, a co- 
operative settlement company, which, in turn, in pursuance 
of its aim, settled upon it, in 1911, a co-operative workingmen's 
association of eighteen members. Besides the members of the 
association, there are seventeen others employed on the estate 
by the month, who have the privilege of becoming members, 
and as a rule the number of employees is fifty, in season rising 
to seventy. Until recently the work, which is grain farming, 
vegetable gardening, cattle-raising, and dairying, with partic- 
ular attention to fodder and animal and green manure, was 
under the supervision of a professional agronomist employed 
under its regulations by the Erez Israel Colonization Associa- 
tion, the co-operative settlement company that is the credit or 
loan-giving body. In July, 1914, the executive committee 



70 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



of the Erez Israel Colonization Association transferred the 
administration of the estate to a commission selected from 
among the members of the workingmen's co-operative associa- 
tion, the interpretation of which is that the technical education 
of the farmers had progressed favorably beyond the need of 
constant tutelage. The commission has the privilege, however, 
of referring agricultural problems to the inspector of the 
Jewish National Fund. The plan of the workingmen's co- 
operative association is Dr. Franz Oppenheimer's, the noted 
authority on economics. It includes a progressive sharing of 
the profits between the co-operative settlement company and 
the co-operative workingmen's association. When the profit 
reaches 4$ of the investment, the estate passes into the hands 
of the workingmen's co-operative association, the amortization 
of the Erez Israel Colonization Company's credit begins, and 
the relation between the National Fund as lessor and the 
workingmen's co-operative association as lessee becomes direct. 

This social, educational, and agricultural experiment is too 
young to admit of a definitive statement of its prospects. Agri- 
culturally it stands for the European intensive farming needed 
in a small country, which cannot be expected to bring quick 
returns. Nevertheless, it has been successful enough to jus- 
tify a second experiment, at Daganiah, with slight varia- 
tions. It should only be added that the plan contemplates the 
introduction of features that will make it applicable to married 
workmen with families as well as to unmarried workmen, and 
will provide for a diversified settlement of farmers, truck- 
farmers, traders, and artisans. The system, it will be noted, 
educates the farmer without making a pupil of him ; the col- 
lective capital of the colonization company puts at his disposal 
advanced technical aids, otherwise unattainable, and thus, 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 71 



it is maintained, large masses of Jews may become the cul- 
tivators of Jewish land, not merely its possessors. 

But not all intending settlers are prepared to join a co- 
operative workingmen's association. There are Jews with more 
or less capital who desire to settle in rural Palestine, provided 
the conditions do not necessitate the exercise of a too hardy 
pioneer spirit. To such the Erez Israel Colonization Associa- 
tion is not a helper. In point of fact it is itself in a sense an 
unenterprising settler. It would welcome the existence of 
properties at least half-way developed, ready for actual settle- 
ment, water provided, wells dug, soil free from stones, ap- 
proaches laid out, and improvements built suitable for its. 
purposes, like barracks, houses, stables, and outhouses. 

Such preparatory work is the function of several organiza- 
tions : the Geulah (1902), the Agudat Netaim (1905), and the 
Palestine Land Development Company, the last the manager 
of the National Fund properties, and therefore an institution 
of the Zionist movement. 

The Geulah started as a land company, merely to buy and 
sell land. It was soon apparent that only improved land would 
attract buyers, and its functions were changed into those of a 
developing company. It has practically confined itself to 
operations in the neighborhood of the established colonies, 
except that latterly it has extended them to the cities. En- 
Gannim, it will be recalled, was founded by the Odessa Com- 
mittee on a Geulah plot near Petah Tikwah. 

The purpose of the Agudat Netaim, a share company like the 
Geulah and the others to be mentioned, is to lay out and culti- 
vate plantations (oranges and almonds), and then divide up 
the property into small salable parcels. It owns two planta- 
tions, Hefzi-bah and Birket Atta, near Hederah, one at Reho- 



72 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



bot, and the Sedjera plantations of the ICA. It also under- 
takes to lay out and superintend such plantations for others 
pending their arrival in the country. Even residents of Pales- 
tine have employed the services of the Agudat Netaim. 

Allied to these, but with still more specific objects, are the 
Tiberias Plantation Company, mentioned before in connection 
with experiments with cotton, and the Irrigation Society 
Palastina (1911), which has constructed a plant on the Eiver 
Audje for irrigating the orange plantations of Petah Tikwah. 

The largest in this class of companies is the Palestine Land 
Development Company. It buys and develops large tracts of 
land. Its first business is to give due attention to the legality 
of the title to the property, and then to manage it and develop 
it, putting it into condition for all sorts of settlers, even to the 
point of planting fruit-trees. At the last, when roads have 
been leveled, water drawn into the estate, and all needful public 
and private improvements made, the tract is divided up into 
parcels, to be disposed of in small peasants' and workingmen's 
holdings, or, if settlers with means present themselves, as larger 
estates. All this proceeds under the supervision of a profes- 
sional agriculturist or gardener, who gives the benefit of his 
advice to the newly-settled owners. When they come to take 
possession, not only is the land in condition for productive 
uses, but the relations with the Arab neighbors have been regu- 
lated. The Palestine Land Development Company is also 
equipped to acquire land and estates on commission and pre- 
pare them for the actual occupancy of the purchasers from 
abroad. The Odessa Committee, for instance, recently em- 
ployed the services of the Palestine Land Development Com- 
pany for the purchase of a piece of land, Hederah Zeita, near 
Hederah. 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 73 

The Zionists of the United States, partly with the Menuhah 
we-Nahalah plan at Eehobot in mind, are attempting to help 
on this phase of Palestine development through the Ahuzah 
movement. It purports to enable Jews in moderate circum- 
stances to unite for the purpose of acquiring land in Palestine 
for future settlement. The plan is for groups of about fifty 
to subscribe for a minimum of seven shares a person at $200 a 
share, payable in weekly or monthly installments in the course 
of seven years, the whole capital to be paid up in ten years at 
the outside. The sum of $1400 so invested will secure an estate 
of sixteen acres, 14r| under cultivation, planted with fruit- 
trees, and reserved for house, barn, and garden. For the 
buildings, furniture, implements, and live stock, the settler is 
required to have another $1000. As soon as the treasurer holds 
$500, it is remitted to the Anglo-Palestine Bank at Jaffa, and 
when a sum has accrued in the bank sufficient to pay for about 
two acres on each share subscribed for, the Palestine Office is 
requested to purchase land for the group. The Palestine Office 
of the Zionist movement is the agent of the National Fund and 
the Palestine Land Development Company. It discharges the 
functions of a land and information bureau, in the latter 
capacity being in close touch with the information bureau 
maintained by the ICA as well as with that maintained by 
the Odessa Committee. After concluding the purchase of a 
satisfactory piece of land, the Palestine Office engages an 
expert to manage and develop the Ahuzah estate. It is 
supposed that the payments of the first three years will buy 
the land needed. In ten years the colony is ready to receive 
settlers and grant them a livelihood. The calculation is that 
14J acres of fruit-bearing trees will yield an income of $380 
annually. If at the end of the period of ten years one or 



74 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



another of the would-be settlers has not saved the thousand 
dollars needed for buildings, etc., he can either proceed to 
the colony and depend upon finding employment there, sure 
that according to the regulations his skill will be resorted to 
rather than an outsider's; or he can allow the income from 
his little estate to accrue for three or four years to make up 
the expenses of settlement. 

There are now eleven such groups in six cities of the United 
States and two in Canada, and the plan has spread to Russia 
and Germany. Five of the associations have purchased land 
in Palestine, chiefly in the region between Haifa and the Valley 
of Jezreel. Some of the members of the first St. Louis and of 
the Chicago Ahuzah groups have already gone forward to 
Palestine; the former are settled at Poriah, in Galilee, near 
the Sea of Tiberias. 

Out of the Ahuzah sprang the Zion Commonwealth, an 
organization of national instead of local scope. Its plan pro- 
vides for individual holdings of about acres, which is suffi- 
cient for a homestead. This represents a single share certifi- 
cate. The members who intend to do farming are expected to 
subscribe for at least ten such certificates. Besides, the Zion 
Commonwealth has adopted a radical land policy, whereby at 
least 10 fc of all the lands purchased will be kept as an inalien- 
able communal estate, to be leased but not sold, on which will 
be built the city, town, or industrial district of the community. 
From the communal land all the members will draw rent and 
profit. The Zion Commonwealth has bought a tract of 400 
acres, with the option on 3000 more, in the Valley of Jezreel. 

The Ahuzah and Zion Commonwealth plans have not 
reached even the tentative, experimental stage recently attained 
by Merhawiah and Daganiah and their co-operative societies. 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 75 

It should be clearly understood that it remains for the future 
to demonstrate the practicability of all of them. 

The activity of the Erez Israel Colonization Association 
begun in Merhawiah has been made possible by a special fund 
of the Jewish National Fund, called Genossenschaftsfond 
(fund for co-operative societies). Besides financing the sort 
of colonization that results directly in settlements (Siedlung), 
it is designed to support the form of colonization that may be 
called occupancy. The early days at Merhawiah could not be 
devoted wholly to tilling the soil to which the workingmen's 
co-operative association had acquired the title. The neighbors 
were unfriendly, the Bedouins inimical; they had to be con- 
ciliated ; it required time and courage to secure the conditions 
for peaceful pursuits. That early period was a record not so 
much of settlement as of occupancy. 

Those who know conditions best in Palestine look upon the 
Transjordanic region as the most promising for Jewish settle- 
ment. The land is cheap, there is much to be had of it, and it 
is fertile and well-watered. But it can be won and held only by 
the hardihood and unremitting industry of the pioneer. With 
Merhawiah and Transjordania in mind, the Genossenschafts- 
fond has as its second purpose to equip expeditions that are 
to consist in part of well-trained agriculturists, in part of 
young men prepared to rough it, and in part of officials, 
agronomists, physicians, nurses, artisans, etc., who are to be 
supplied with tools, implements, camp furniture, drugs, sur- 
gical appliances, and foodstuffs — all that may be necessary to 
take actual and peaceable possession, through the plough, of 
lands sometimes only nominally come into the ownership of 
Jewish purchasers through money. 



76 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



No such expedition has yet been equipped, but on a small 
scale the work has been done on the west side of the Jordan. 
At this time groups called Kewuzot-Kibbush are doing the pre- 
liminary work on several National Fund estates recently 
acquired, as at Hattin and Bir Adas. Once occupancy is 
made secure by them, they have the choice of settling, on terms 
recognizing their pioneer work, as colonizers on the lands they 
have opened up, or moving on to the next station and in 
turn bringing it into the circle of civilized communities. 

In 1914 it was estimated that from eighteen to twenty thou- 
sand tourists had visited Palestine in the spring. It is fair 
to assume that ninety per cent of them " went up " to Jeru- 
salem on the railroad from Jaffa, and viewed the hill-country 
of Judea from the car window. From the erroneous impres- 
sions of the infertility of Palestine that prevail in many 
quarters, it is also fair to assume that a large percentage of 
those who come of their own accord "to spy out the land," 
bring back a " report 99 on technical questions without inquir- 
ing into the geologic and historical causes that have produced 
the bare and gray hillsides, awesome as only mountains are 
elsewhere. They speak without informing themselves about 
soil and climate and the present status of agriculture in the 
land. They, and Baedeker too, ignore the whole development 
of Jewish colonization, the positive outcome of which nega- 
tives the casual traveler's haphazard conclusions regarding 
the possibility of a future Palestine flowing with milk and 
honey. The time is not far distant when at least the Jewish 
tourist, holding a Jewish guidebook in his hand, or subject 
to the tender mercies of a Jewish dragoman, will alight at 
Lydda and drive to Hulda to view the Herzl Forest of olive- 
trees and the nurseries planted there by the National Fund 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 77 



since 1909, and convince himself that Jewish endeavor can 
and will clothe the bare spots that have been denuded through 
ignorance, neglect, abuse, and lack of means and modern 
method. 

Or he will stop off at Ben Shamen closer to the railroad, and 
be rewarded not only by witnessing the success of the reaffores- 
tation efforts of the National Fund made there too, but also 
by the sight of the little Bezalel industrial colony of Yemenites. 
In their ateliers equipped for them by the National Fund he 
will stand beside the foreman and watch the filigree workers 
fashion dainty silver articles, and the carpenters wield their 
tools, and the women weave carpets and sew needle lace. - 
Before he leaves, the same women will hospitably press upon 
him milk from their own dairies and vegetables from their 
own garden-plots beside their houses, and insist upon his in- 
specting their cackling chicken runs. If he still has time 
between trains, he will test the olive soap turned out in the 
factory, or he will seek out the members of the co-operative 
workingmen's association at work in the fields, and listen to 
their explanation of their social and agricultural undertaking ; 
he will hear about their success in cattle-rearing; and he will 
inform himself of the methods used with the pupil-working- 
men on the farm. 

These reafforestation stations, like the ICA and the National 
Fund farm schools, are sending forth farm and garden 
workers that constitute the best material hitherto available for 
the Jewish colonization. But they can be depended upon 
primarily only to supply the educational need of the adult 
immigrant. If generations of Jewish farmers are to be trained 
up, additional measures must be taken. As a matter of fact, 
facilities do already exist. Indeed, the very first Jewish 



78 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



agricultural undertaking in the Holy Land was the Mikweh 
Israel Agricultural School, established by the Alliance Israelite 
Universelle, in 1870, near Jaffa, on the road on which, further 
to the south, Eishon le-Zion was located twelve years later. 
The handsome buildings and cellars are situated on an estate of 
650 acres, skillfully and charmingly laid out with indigenous 
and foreign plants and trees. The school has an adequate 
annual budget of about $10,000. In spite of its comparatively 
long life, its priority in the field, and its plant, equipment, and 
funds, the institution has not been an effective factor in the 
agricultural development of Palestine. It has stood away from 
the swift currents of Jewish life there, somewhat as the ad- 
ministrators of the Rothschild colonies are charged with 
having done. The language of instruction and of intercourse 
is French, the course of studies lasts four years, and the cur- 
riculum is calculated to turn out, not peasants or farmers or 
rural settlers of any kind, but only professional agronomists, 
who seek positions as inspectors, supervisors, landscape- 
gardeners, and teachers at other schools. The result is that 
a not inconsiderable part of its graduates have gone into other 
callings, and a large majority of those who stuck to their last 
left Palestine and exercised their vocation in Egypt, the 
Levant countries, France, and the United States. At one time, 
under a director friendly to Palestine colonization, pupils of 
the school actually became settlers in the colonies, and the 
number of pupils in the school rose to 200. The next incum- 
bent changed the policy, and the attendance dropped to 75. 
Recently a new spirit has again been stirring in the institution, 
and there is a prospect that it may co-ordinate itself with the 
trend of Palestinian thought, which is considering, not emigra- 
tion, but immigration, and not the aspirations of the individual 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 79 



after self-culture so much as the longing of the masses of 
Jewish immigrants for normal, healthful activity. 

At the end of 1912 an agricultural college was opened in 
Petah Tikwah with a very ambitious four-years' program: 
Hebrew, French, Arabic, mathematics, history, geography, 
chemistry, botany, physics, surveying, meteorology, zoology, 
geology, and mineralogy ; soil chemistry, the installing of plan- 
tations, cattle-raising, medicine, dairying, plant pathology, 
administration of farms, agrarian law, commercial law, etc. 
To practical work only two hours a week are assigned. There 
would seem to be a repetition here of the mistakes committed 
at Mikweh Israel. The time has been too short for a demon- 
stration of value or the reverse. 

The Verband judischer Frauen fur Kulturarbeit in Palas- 
tina is conducting a unique undertaking at Kinneret, near the 
Sea of Tiberias, on land belonging to the National Fund. It 
has established there a farm school for girls, with a two years' 
course. Candidates must be at least seventeen years old. The 
pupils enjoy free tuition, board, and lodging, as well as a 
monthly stipend. The work is predominatingly practical, 
occupying the pupils from seven to nine hours daily. The 
subjects on the curriculum are botany, elementary chemistry 
and physics, cooking and preserving, in the first year; and in 
the second, the elements of scientific agriculture, fertilizing 
methods, plant diseases, the principles underlying various 
crops, poultry-raising, cattle-breeding, and the care of dairy 
products. The school has for its use sixteen acres of land for 
ornamental gardening, vegetable gardening, and forestry, and 
a barnyard. All the work of the farm is done by the pupils, 
as well as the sewing and cooking required in the household 
of the institution. 



80 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



The importance of this farm school cannot be overestimated. 
For years the critics of Jewish Palestine colonization have 
justly pointed to the untrained Jewish woman on the farm as 
one of the radical difficulties. The Yemenite women, even 
before their houses are built for them, as soon as the place on 
which they are to be erected is designated, plot and plant their 
gardens for vegetables, for home use and for sale. That is 
the spirit of the true farmer's wife, and Russian Jewish girls 
are acquiring it. As was mentioned before, there were some 
on the farm at Sedjera. They shouldered their hoes and went 
forth to the field, and worked all day without asking quarter. 
The same is said to be true of the girl farmers at Merhawiah, 
and the vegetable-growers at Med j del on the land of the 
Tiberias Plantation Company. It is certain that one of the 
best farmers in Lower Galilee was a woman, to watch whom 
was a delight when she stood throwing feed to her barnyard 
full of geese, chickens, and pigeons; when she tended her 
well-cared-for cattle in their substantial stalls; when she dis- 
cussed prices with a would-be buyer, standing over her golden 
grain, as it lay heaped up in her store-chamber ; when she gave 
her orders to her employees at whose head she went to her 
fields ; and when, in the gloaming, before the door of her own 
cottage, she discoursed on the value of bananas for Palestine, 
or told her reminiscences of the early days of the colonization 
— an embodiment of the Hebrew philosopher's " valiant " 
woman. 

There are several other educational plans, partly under way, 
partly under discussion, which promise well for the future of 
agriculture. The schools at Rehobot and Katra include 
gardening in their curriculum. A Frankfort society conducts 
a school for girls at Petah Tikwah, in which the pupils are 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 81 



taught cooking and gardening and vegetable-raising. In addi- 
tion to the regular classrooms, there is a model kitchen, 
dining-room, laundry, pantry, butler's pantry, and bath, 
besides a considerable piece of land for the gardening. 

The German Boys' Orphan Asylum was removed a short 
while ago from Jerusalem to En-Gannim, and the change may 
give the opportunity for agricultural training to another group 
of young people. The Madchenheim, the Orphan Asylum 
instituted for the daughters of the victims of the Kishinev 
pogrom, is likewise to be removed from J erusalem to Eehobot, 
and the intention is to add gardening and other country pur- 
suits to the curriculum. 

Finally, through the interest of some American Jews, op- 
portunity has been given to several young men, sons of early 
colonists, to go to California and complete their studies, begun 
in Palestine partly on their fathers' land. Their attainments 
can only benefit Palestine, seeing that California resembles 
it so closely in climate, geologic formation, and agricultural 
problems and advantages, while surpassing it in prosperity and 
technical progress. All those assisted in this way have pledged 
themselves to return to their fatherland and utilize their skill 
and knowledge in its behalf. 

To a group of American Jews Palestine owes also the Jew- 
ish Agricultural Experiment Station, incorporated in 1910 
under the laws of the State of New York. The experiment 
farms are at Athlit, and a subsidiary field, used as a nursery, 
is at Hederah. The chief work of the Station has been the 
cross-fertilization of the wild wheat discovered in Palestine by 
the Managing Director, Mr. Aaron Aaronsohn, an investiga- 
tion that will require a number of years. The task he has set 
himself is that of producing a variety of wheat that shall com- 



82 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



bine, with the wild plant's resistance to disease and to climatic, 
soil, and meteorologic conditions, the nutritive and other 
qualities of the degenerate cultivated varieties. Along with 
this goes an investigation of methods of agriculture, especially 
of the value of the American dry-f arming for semi-arid regions 
applied to Palestine in point of implements and soil treatment. 
The Director's researches have already proved so valuable that 
some of his results have been published by the Department of 
Agriculture of the United States, and the wild wheat, in which 
the western States have a special interest, has been observed at 
several of the American Agricultural Stations with interesting 
results. Between the Department and the Station at Athlit a 
system of plant exchanges has been established, probably to 
the advantage of both Palestine and America. 

Besides wheat other products are under observation : sesame, 
barley, and oats; citrus, with a view to improving the orange 
production and introducing grape fruit and other species; 
grapes, not only for wines but also for the table and for 
raisins; mulberry trees, to determine the kinds best adapted 
for Palestine silk production; ornamental trees and shrubs 
for the cottage gardens; opuntia, to secure a spineless variety 
for fodder ; and many others, while practical farmers, garden- 
ers, and scientists have been particularly interested in the 
study made of plant diseases prevalent in Palestine. 

The scope of the Station is unlimited. Small as Palestine 
is, and though libraries have been written on it, there are still 
many uncharted regions and unanswered questions. Soil and 
meteorological conditions are not known with accurate detail. 
Encroaching almost upon the Station's experimental fields at 
Athlit are the dunes, creeping up on the fertile Sharon valley 
where once stood populous cities and wondrous gardens. They 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 83 



need investigation. Fodder and fertilizers are still open sub- 
jects. Fruit-trees are under debate : some believe apples, pears, 
cherries, plums, and quinces are not worth while ; others insist 
that they with peaches and apricots have a future second only 
to wine and oranges and almonds and olives. The variety of 
leguminous plants has not been exploited especially as forage 
plants, the possibilities of cotton and tobacco have not been 
determined, and the pasture lands are waiting for the atten- 
tion of the expert. 

The Kewuzot-Kibbush mentioned above, the "pioneer 
groups," are a new phenomenon, but the sentiment under- 
lying their organization prevails throughout Palestine : " We 
must win the land we desire to live on not with money alone, 
but also with the plough." 

To what extent has land been so won? 

Before this question can be answered, we must know on 
what land it is that Jewish immigrants are setting out to 
win an abode for themselves. What is meant by the term 
Palestine ? 

The question has had many answers given to it. As a 
matter of fact, the term Palestine does not, in modern 
Turkey, correspond to a definite political division of the land, 
just as it was a term for a variable concept in the days of 
Israel's independence. Some make it include El-Arish on the 
Egyptian frontier ; some extend it northward to Beirut ; some 
give it an area of 10,425 square miles; some of 14,054; some 
of 16,217. If we accept the most generous dimensions, it can 
be placed in California nine times with 12,344 square miles 
to spare. In general, it is agreed that it is the southern part 
of Syria lying to the west of the Jordan, together with lands 
in Trans jordania. In realization of the indefiniteness of the 



84 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



concept, most of the Jewish colonization societies, it will be 
recalled, describe their sphere loosely as Palestine and Syria. 

Of this area Jewish hands are cultivating about 175 to 200 
square miles, and the work is being done by more than 10,000 
Jewish colonists, in a land that has 67 persons to a square mile. 
The northernmost possession, Metullah, lies in a line with the 
old Tyre; the southernmost, Djemama, in a line with Gaza, 
also the old, but recently renewing its ancient fame as a center 
of barley-planting and a port for shipments. The road from 
Jaffa to Jerusalem is dotted with Jewish settlements. Two 
centers are thickly sown, Judea near Jaffa and Galilee near the 
Sea of Tiberias. In the Plain of Sharon, between Jaffa and 
Haifa, there are ten Jewish possessions, the Valley of Jezreel 
has been entered, and the pioneer has pushed across the 
Jordan. The Jew thus is planted with both his feet on the 
soil of his fathers. 

THE RURAL DEVELOPMENT 

LIFE IN THE JEWISH VILLAGES 

Jewish Villages — A Small Village — A Large Village — Charitable 
Societies — Village Budgets — Village Schools — The City Coun- 
cil — The Mukhtar — A Specimen Budget — Education and the 
Jewish Farmer — Recreations — Hagigah — Union of Judean 
Colonies — The Night-Watch — Relation to Arabs — Proselytes — 
Yemenites — The Sabbath. 

So far only the economic shell of Jewish colonization in 
Palestine has been described. The content is life, complete, 
vivid, and Jewish. 

We have been speaking of colonies, a term repudiated by the 
Palestinian Jews. It has a tentative sound in their ears, 
while what they have, or what possesses them, is a home-feel- 
ing, physical and spiritual. They insist that they live in 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 85 

Jewish villages, and they are proud with a peculiar pride of 
their clusters of red-roofed houses gleaming like beacons in 
the Palestinian atmosphere from an amazing distance. En- 
shrined in those homes is something new in the way of J ewish- 
ness, of which they are the originators. Their pride is the 
pride of the creator, not the upstart pride of ownership. ♦ 

The home-feeling is strongly marked even when the settle- 
ment boasts only a single short street, as in the young Lower 
Galilean villages. On each side the simple little houses are set 
close together for social, mutually helpful action. The plots 
in front, forming parallel garden lines, face each other along 
the whole length. Beyond, all around, lie the deep-furrowed 
Jewish fields. Such is the village of Sedjera nestled at the 
rim of the overturned bowl of Mount Tabor. Sometimes the 
pattern, primitive as it is, was executed wretchedly, as at 
Athlit in the Plain of Sharon on the southernmost spur of 
the Carmel. The backs of the single row of two-roomed 
cottages rose almost even with the precipice, forbidding expan- 
sion of family and possessions. Instead of gardens the stables 
were ranged opposite to the bleak, porchless front doors. At 
the base of the crag,' a little way across the dunes, the whole 
of an Arab village population is housed, owl-like, in the 
crevices of the ruins of Athlit, the crusaders' fortress jutting 
out into the sea. Jewish Athlit is an improvement on such a 
tenement, say its builders in lame self-defense. In general, 
it is true that the Arab village even at its best serves as an 
excellent foil to the Jewish village. The windowless Arab 
houses like cliff-swallows' nests are built against the earthen 
quarry from which they are hewn — gray on gray. The tribal 
enemy approaching with hostile intent fails to see them long 
after he has been espied and preparations have been made for 



86 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



his warm reception. In contrast to this, the Jewish village 
is frank and wholesome, planned for the uses of life, not 
merely to ward off death. 

The single street of the primitive Jewish village quickly 
sends out branches, especially in the less exposed south 
country, in Judea. The suburban type develops, of which the 
old Rothschild colonies are the completest exemplars, set in 
their wreath of glistening orange-groves or more delicately 
branched almond plantations. In Rishon le-Zion and Petah 
Tikwah some of the houses are villa-like, and the smaller 
cottages are trim and attractive with their garden inclosures. 
The streets are lined with trees, and feathery acacias and 
mimosas border the lanes to the vineyards. 

These grown-up villages have their sights. There is the 
synagogue, placed sometimes, as in Rehobot, on the highest 
point, dominating the village physically and its life spiritually, 
as the Catholic church dominates the South German village, 
and the meeting-house the New England village. There are 
the schools with their ample, shaded yards. There is some- 
times, as at Zichron Jacob and elsewhere, a hospital, and some- 
times a bath, and a community-house for recreation, and a 
meeting-house for the town assemblies. In Rishon le-Zion 
there is a palm garden, a charming token of the golden Roths- 
child days. From the same lavish period dates the beautifully 
planted public park in Zichron Jacob. There are the water 
works, the cherished fountains of health for the residents and 
the guarantors of growth for the plantations. Occasionally 
there is also the Arab market, Orientally picturesque, and 
along with it goes what one must call a " slum " district. By 
way of compensation one pays a visit to the spruce working- 
men's suburb at En-Gannim, near Petah Tikwah. The liberal 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 87 

credit-system adopted there, coupled with the energetic initia- 
tive of the builder-owners, has produced pleasing variety and 
individuality. The wide street no sooner laid out was planted 
with young trees, and the front gardens could at once be 
watered from the works visible at its head. They are the 
chief boast of the little settlement, which was largely fashioned 
by the residents themselves in their leisure hours. Now they 
are privileged to spend them on ample " suburbanite " veran- 
dahs. 

And these grown-up villages as well as the smaller ones have 
their charities, too — a Sick- Visiting Society (Bikkur Holim, 
or Mishmeret Holim), a Shelter for the Stranger (Haknasat 
Orhim), and a mutual loan society (Gemillat Hasadim), 
which has latterly been replaced in part by the co-operative 
societies described before. 

Mention has been made of Petah Tikwah's budget of 
$16,793 for internal affairs. Petah Tikwah is the most 
populous of the Jewish villages; it has 2670 inhabitants. No 
other has attained to equally complex and costly needs. But 
there is none so small as to have no communal institutions. 
They all tax themselves for public purposes — for schools, 
medical service, water, roads, and recreation. 

The school is the foremost and the inevitable communal 
enterprise. There are sure to be a few elementary classes in 
the smallest settlement. In the larger villages a Kindergarten 
is added at one end and higher classes at the other, until they 
number the full quota of eight, and there is a Talmud Torah 
besides, sometimes more than one. Many of the schools are 
rudimentary institutions, with teachers whose youthful ideal- 
ism has subdued personal desire, but, unaided by professional 
training, has not always achieved the refinements of modern 
3 



88 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



pedagogy. Nevertheless, on the whole, the teaching corps is 
adequate to its task. In the more developed centers the little 
school buildings are not unattractive, and their equipment, 
even in so ultra-modern a respect as the laboratory for young 
children, is admirable. To be sure, where the educational 
plant is so complete, the village has usually enlisted the help 
of the ICA, or the Ezra, or the Hilfsverein, or the Odessa 
Committee. The same agencies, especially the ICA, aid the 
smaller settlements to maintain a physician and a drug room 
with a druggist in attendance at certain hours, and at Petah 
Tikwah the ICA presented to the community its large orange- 
grove as a public domain, the profits to be applied to the 
general needs. 

These communal undertakings naturally demand regulat- 
ing, administrative activity. All the full-fledged villages have 
a Waad, a committee, elected by what is almost equivalent to 
a town meeting. At first only the propertied residents, men 
and women, had the vote. In recent years the workingmen, 
lacking the property qualification, have yet secured the 
suffrage right, the only condition being two years 5 residence in 
the village. But though they may thus determine the make-up 
of the Waad, they are not themselves eligible to it. 

The Waad is at once a legislative and executive body. Its 
functions include the assessment and registration of property, 
budget-making, and the collection of taxes. In the thirty 
years' history of Jewish colonization in Palestine there has 
been practically no opposition to the resolutions of the Waad; 
only once was an appeal from a Jewish town council's decision 
carried outside to the political authorities, and they refused 
to entertain it. Differences between individuals are composed 
by J ewish courts of arbitration, and it has happened frequently 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 89 



enough that Arabs have laid their difficulties before the Waad 
for adjustment. These Jewish village courts have dealt only 
with civil cases. Indeed, in the whole history of the new 
Jewish Palestine there has been but a single case of Jewish 
criminality ! 

When the interests of the colonies expand, the Waad ceases 
to act as a single undivided body on all concerns. It appoints 
committees for the better exercise of some of its functions: 
a committee on education, one on the administration of 
justice, one on the constitution, one on the relation to the 
Wine-Growers Association, one on the co-operative purchase 
of fodder for the cattle of the colony, etc. 

The connection between the village and the Government is 
established, as in the Arab village, through a mukhtar, often 
a member of the Waad. This is not peculiar to the villages. 
In Turkey a certain degree of autonomy is granted to ethno- 
graphic, national, and religious groups. Hence the severance 
of nationalities and religious communities from each other in 
their peculiar " quarters 99 in the cities is more marked than 
in most countries, and hence we have the internal govern- 
ment of the Jewish rural and city communities. The mukh- 
tar is primarily the fiscal agent, through whom the taxes for 
which a given community is liable are transmitted. Turkish 
taxes are imposed on all Ottoman subjects alike, but the 
mukhtar institution affords a community the chance of 
exempting its own poor, and collecting from its more pros- 
perous members the sum total, to be turned over to the 
Government through its accredited agent. 

Mr. Curt Nawratzki, in his remarkable book on Jewish 
colonization in Palestine, quotes a specimen budget, that of 
Kastinieh, which is full of human interest. Kastinieh, or Ber 



90 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



Tobiah, as it is often called, is, it will be remembered, the 
southernmost of the Judean colonies, closer to Gaza than to 
Jaffa. It raises only wheat, sesame, barley, peas, beans, etc. ; 
there are no fruit plantations. It has a population of 150, 
and owns 1278 acres of land. All the colonists work the land 
themselves, and most of them constantly employ at least one 
" hired man," who is paid in kind to the value of about $80 a 
year. In 1910 two colonists made between $620 and $640; 
one made $740; three between $860 and $880; two between 
$1000 and $1040; and two brothers in partnership, $1320. 
The gross income of the whole settlement was $11,000. The 
Government tax amounted to one-eighth of the threshed pro- 
duce; and there were expenditures on account of negotiations 
with the tax-farmer, etc. The military tax had by that time 
been abrogated in Turkey, but in Kastinieh the Waad con- 
tinued to impose it to make up a fund for the support of the 
families whose breadwinners were serving in the army, or 
would serve, on behalf of the colony. 

The budget for the internal needs of the community was as 
follows : 



Pump and water supply $965.76 

Bath 51.15 

Teacher 288.00 

Physician (Leech) 180.27 

Butcher (Shohet) 108.00 

Mukhtar 48.00 

Secretary 33.05 

Dues to Union of Judean Colonies 23.79 

For drawing map of colony 15.17 

Post 10.16 

Night-watch 268.48 

Military tax 161.98 

Entertainment of officials 27.74 

Expenses incident to conflict between two 

colonists 84.05 

Unspecified expenses 364.60 



$2630.20 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 91 



The only help given to Kastinieh comes from the Odessa 
Committee, which pays $624 for the third, fourth, fifth, and 
sixth items in the list, thns leaving $2000 for the farmers 
themselves, about $100 a family. 

Here is betrayed a serious disadvantage inherent in the 
small settlement. The burden imposed by intellectual aspira- 
tions is too heavy to be borne by a restricted community. But 
if peasant is doomed to remain the synonym of hind and rustic 
boor, the Jew will never become a genuine peasant, even in 
Palestine. He must be in a position to give his children a 
thorough schooling; the practical application of scientific re- 
search and technical ingenuity must not be beyond his reach. 
He must not be expected to cut himself off from the world of 
thought and creation. These as a modern man he claims as 
his heritage, and when he insists upon their compatibility with 
a peasant's occupation, he is in line with the most enlightened 
endeavors of the economist and statesman of our day. How 
then, in the early stage of Jewish colonization, can his problem 
be solved, if he is to be spared oppressive taxation ? The ICA 
met it in one way in Yemma and Bedjen. They are placed 
within a bowshot of each other. One set of communal institu- 
tions serves both, and the cost of maintenance is distributed 
among a larger number of taxpayers than in an isolated colony. 
The advantage, it is true, must be paid for in time instead of 
money : the fields lie to one side of the colony, not around it, 
and so some of them are at a greater distance from the farmers' 
houses than they would be otherwise. The co-operative enter- 
prises described in the previous section will also carry the Jew 
a long way towards peasantry without exacting too large a 
spiritual sacrifice. However, the future may be trusted to 



92 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



solve the problem radically, for the reason that the Jew him- 
self may be trusted to lead a life in which intellectual train- 
ing and pursuits have an unalterable place. 

After the school and the physician, the drug room, the bath, 
and the hospital are provided for, attention and funds are 
appropriated for the recreation center, the Bet ha-Am, a 
modest " People's Palace." There is one in each of the larger 
villages. It is the meeting-place of the societies, the literary, 
the athletic, and the musical. It has a library and a newspaper 
room, and occasionally concerts and lectures are given in it. 
As was mentioned before, even the barracks put up by the 
National Fund for unmarried workingmen are provided with 
libraries. As for music, the Jew has made Palestine vocal. 
There is singing everywhere, in garden and field and the 
school-yard throughout the day, and in the evening the strains 
of amateur orchestras are sure to issue from one or another 
open window. 

The life in the Jewish villages thus has its gracious aspects. 
The J ew outside — even, or especially, one who believes Jewish 
colonization in Palestine to be the means of securing another 
happy home for his people, in which besides normal tears also 1 
normal laughter may be his portion — is apt to think of the 
undertaking as a desiccated "experiment" or an abstract 
"problem." He ought to be present at the Hagigah during 
Hoi ha-Moed Pesah, in Rehobot. From the whole of Jewish 
Palestine, from all the villages, the visitors come. The young 
people compete with one another in games, athletics, debates, 
declamations, and song. There is an exhibit of agricultural 
products after the fashion of a county fair. But what im- 
presses the strangers from abroad most of all is the mighty 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 93 

chorus of voices raised in the Hebrew songs that have origi- 
nated on the soil, and have spread to all parts of the land. 
Spectators describe the experience as thrilling. Here is the 
spirit of play, the token and safeguard of mental health. 

Physically the Judean villages are brought close to one 
another by a regular omnibus or stage coach system connecting 
them with Jaffa, and in Galilee the new wagon roads, imper- 
fect though they are, make intercourse between settlements 
comparatively easy. Otherwise intercolonial relations have 
not been organized. The Waad of each village is independent 
of every other. But the subject of a union has not been left 
undiscussed. Eepresentatives of the Odessa Committee en- 
deavored, in 1903, to effect an organization of the Jewry of 
Palestine, at least of the New Settlement, the elements in- 
terested in advancing the economic and social status of the 
Jews. A Kenessiah, a convention of delegates, assembled at 
Zichron Jacob, and steps were taken looking to permanence 
and the inclusion eventually of the Old Settlement. Nothing 
came of it. Even of sectional unions there is only one, that 
of the Judean colonies, organized in 1909, a sort of grange 
without the feature of lodge secrets. The general purpose is 
the advancement of the economic, cultural, and political situa- 
tion of the colonies; its specific objects are the founding of 
syndicates for the sale of products ; the improvement of agri- 
cultural methods by the introduction and demonstration of 
new implements; the organizing of cattle insurance societies 
and the employment of a veterinary surgeon; the improve- 
ment of the health conditions in the colonies; the spread of 
knowledge by lectures, demonstrations, etc., on agricultural 
subjects, and by the introduction of natural science in the 



94 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



curriculum of the colony schools; and the employment of a 
professional agronomist who shall supervise agricultural ex- 
periments. 

Though it cannot be called intercolonial, there is an associa- 
tion that makes itself felt in all the villages, north and south. 
Ha-Shomer, the Jewish guard or night-watch, is one of the 
most remarkable phenomena of the new Palestinian life. 
From the first it was necessary to guard against depredations 
by the Arabs, and watchmen were engaged from among the 
suspects to patrol the Jewish fields at night. Though a saving 
was effected, the arrangement was not calculated to inspire 
confidence. In point of fact, there were still considerable 
leakages through favoritism and connivance at thefts ; and the 
Arab guard often was rendered ineffective on account of recur- 
ring family and tribal feuds. In the winter of 1909-1910, 
dissatisfaction with the prevailing system was rife. Especially 
in the Galilean highland, the nursery of Jewish sentiment from 
of old, the more ardent spirits among the young workingmen 
could not brook the humiliation the Jewish farmers had to 
endure. Word flew from settlement to settlement, and the 
Jewish colony guard came into existence. At first the service 
was confined to Galilee; but now practically all the colonies 
depend upon the Shomerim. Eehobot alone recently organized 
a watch of its own. Petah Tikwah pays $6000 a year; little 
Kastinieh's budget shows $268.48 for the item night-watch. 
A single Shomer receives $100 annually, but as a rule a posse 
is engaged by the colony as a whole. Two organizations sub- 
vention Ha-Shomer, the Odessa Committee and the Work- 
men's Union. In spite of the costliness of the service, there 
seems to be hardly a dissenting voice as to its value, a recogni- 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 95 



tion the more remarkable as the citizen, the Baale-Battim, ele- 
ment in the villages still squirms at the idea of a self-consti- 
tuted and self-governed company of Jewish youths, revolver- 
armed, most of them noted for zeal and ebullient enthusiasm. 
That the discharged Arab guard looks upon the Shomerim as 
" scabs v is not calculated to allay anxiety. The situation offers 
redoubtable openings on both sides, and there have been a few 
bloody, even fatal encounters between the two nationalities. 
The general impression appears to be that the Shomerim are 
innocent of aggression; they have gone to extremes only in 
self-defense. Besides insuring the safety of Jewish property, 
Ha-Shomer has raised the dignity of the Jew in the eyes of 
his Arab neighbors. A Jew who is a good shot, and rides a 
horse, bareback if you will, with the same grace as the Arab, 
and cuts a good figure at that as he gallops 'cross country, 
exacts respect. At all events, Ha-Shomer with its hundred 
and more members has become an absolute necessity in Pales- 
tine, arid a picturesque feature in its rural life. The company 
is made up of the material needed for the pioneer bands that 
are to prepare outlying regions through occupancy by them- 
selves for permanent settlement and cultivation by others. 

In general, the relation between Jews and Arabs is not un- 
satisfactory, in spite of the friction that occurs at certain 
points of contact. The reasonable expectation is that it will 
improve, because the mutual respect is increasing. The Arab 
has begun to recognize the value that has accrued to him and 
the land by the presence and the activity of the Jew. He 
already pays him the flattery of imitation. In some places he 
has adopted the modern methods and implements introduced 
by the Jew. On the other hand, the Jew recognizes that the 



96 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



Arab may be his teacher in all that relates to the soil. His 
fiber is, as it were, habituated to it. He knows it by instinct. 
For instance, the primitive plow of the Arab husbandman, 
wielded by his predecessor on the soil three thousand years ago, 
it was thought must be banished beyond recall. More careful 
investigation has demonstrated that on some soils deep upturn- 
ing is harmful ; the superficial scratching of the wooden plow- 
share with its small iron attachment is exactly what is needed. 
Such recognitions, of mutual helpfulness will multiply and 
make for a better understanding and neighborly tolerance. 
But that the relation is an aspect of Jewish colonization that 
will require wisdom and tact and statesmanship can and should 
not be minimized; nor are the leaders of Palestine public 
opinion guilty of neglect in this particular. 

The Arab is not the only non- Jewish element in the villages. 
As one goes up and down the land, one constantly meets Gerim, 
converts to Judaism, from Eussia. They have been the special 
protegees of the ICA. Inured to agricultural labor for centu- 
ries, they were doubtless considered a good leaven in the mass 
of city-bred novices at farming, with whom they were united 
by one bond — persecution inflicted for the sake of a Panslavic 
ideal. 

About six years ago another element supplying an agricul- 
tural leaven was introduced into the colonies, one that tended 
to fortify Jewish tradition besides. The Yemenites are 
typically stiffnecked Jews. They claim a history of twenty- 
four centuries in the Dispersion. Yet they " return " to the 
Holy Land as inveterately Jewish as though they had never 
been " exiled " from close communion with the stock of their 
people. Constituted as they are, tenaciously and loyally 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 97 



Jewish, intellectually alert, Arabic in speech and habit, accus- 
tomed to work in field and shop, they are destined, unless all 
signs fail, to be a cement between Arab and Jew. between the 
industrially-minded Jew of the city and the agriculturally- 
minded Jew of the country, between Sefardi and Ashkenazi. 

The above picture of the Jewish village in Palestine is far 
from complete. Enumerations and descriptions are inade- 
quate to convey its spirit. To learn its flavor one must spend 
a Sabbath in Zichron Jacob, or Eehobot, or Ekron. It is a 
Jewish flavor. The spirit of the Sabbath rest descends on the 
village early Friday afternoon. The laborers hasten home 
from the fields several hours sooner than on other days. 
Family groups, decked out in half- Sabbath finery, gather on 
the porches around the tea urn. Except that the children, 
released from school earlier than on the ordinary week-day, 
may be heard singing Hebrew songs as they run in and out of 
the plantations, an expectant hush lies upon the village. The 
Sabbath bride is about to arrive. And when she is there, 
throughout the following day, the place is pervaded by her 
presence. At the times of rejoicing, Simhat Torah and Purim. 
all the villagers unite in celebrating them. The festive table 
is not spread in the houses, but on the open street, and the 
choruses fill the air. Even those who came from densely- 
populated Jewish quarters in Polish and Russian cities, or 
from towns and villages all but entirely Jewish — even they, 
raised in the atmosphere of a compact Jewish community life, 
maintain that this is a different Sabbath from any they ever 
knew. What is the Sabbath spice? Is it the out-of-doors 
which the Jew has at last recaptured? — the out-of-doors 
known by his ancestor who sang the Song of Songs ? 



OS 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



THE URBAN DEVELOPMENT 

Growth of the Cities— The New Settlement in the Cities — Th 1 
Halukkah — History of the Halukkah — Messengers — Distribu 
tion of the Halukkah — Defects of Organization — Central Com 
mittee of Halukkah — The American Kolel — The Hasidic Kole 
— Activities of the Kolelim — Philanthropic Institutions — Soui 
Kitchens — Visiting Nurses — The Housing Problem — Judal 
Touro — The Hospices of the Kolelim — Urban " Colonies "— 
" Quarters "— Tel-Abib in Jaffa— Other Jaffa Suburbs— Herze, 
lia in Haifa — Improvements near Tiberias — Retail Business- 
Handicrafts: Alliance — Bezplel — Home Industrie? — Abra . 
ham's Vineyard — Other Industrial Opportunities — ICA Loai 
Bank — Trades and Industries — Recent Relations between the 
Two Settlements. 

u If you want cities, create villages." Doctor Franz Oppen- 
heimer's rule, he himself holds, has been exemplified in Pales- 
tine. In 1881 Jerusalem is said to have had 35,000 inhabit- 
ants, of whom about 12,000 were Jews; in 191-1, 50,000 Jews 
out of 100,000 inhabitants were attributed to it. Jaffa had 
5000 Jews in 1905, by 1910 it had twice five thousand. Haifa 
had only 2000 out of 20,000 in 1910, but it has been growing 
at a rapid rate since then. The significant point is that the 
increase in Jewish city populations corresponds to the develop- 
ment of the rural colonization work. 

It was said above that of the 100,000 Jews in Palestine now 
(1914), 85,000 are living in twelve cities. They are Jeru- 
salem, Jaffa, Gaza, Hebron, Eamleh, Beer-Sheba, Safed, 
Tiberias, Haifa, Saida (Sidon), Accho, and Shefa Amr. The 
four "holy cities/' Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias, 
contain over 80$ of all city-dwelling Jews, and nearly 70$ of 
all Jews, in Palestine. 

These four cities are still the citadels of the Old Settlement. 
Yet the new spirit is beginning to make its way even into them. 
Considering them either impregnable or negligible, the New 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IX PALESTINE 



99 



Settlement long made no attempt to woo or to assail them. 
The immigrant into Palestine that desired to lead a normal 
••ity life settled in Jaffa, as the phenomenal growth of its Jew- 
sh population shows. Close as we are to our generation's 
ictivity, it is impossible to determine whether Old Jerusalem 
made the advances to the Xew Settlement, or vice versa. 
Suffice it to say that the Xew Settlement has dropped its real 
or assumed indifference, and that the Holv City has become 
hospitable to the new. without disavowing its old, ideals. 

There was never, of course, any intention on the part of the 
Xew Settlement to discredit the religious aspirations of the 
Old. Its objection was and is to the methods of the Halukkah, 
the " division " of the moneys gathered from all over the world, 
wherever Jews dwell, for the support of their brethren leading 
a life of study and prayer in the Holy Land. On two grounds 
the religionists claim the support as their right; they consider 
themselves, as was said before, the " representatives " of the 
Jews in the Dispersion; and. in so far as they are aged, they 
receive only that which would have been granted to them had 
they remained in their communities abroad. As a matter of 
fact, not all the members of the Old Settlement are advanced 
in years; nor on the other hand are they all Halukkah 
recipients. Some are supplied with means by their relatives 
left behind hi Occidental countries ; some draw a revenue from 
their investments in Palestine or in their former homes ; some 
follow a trade or have a business on which they depend, or with 
which they eke out the small stipend allotted to them in the 
" division.'' 

Past and present circumstances being what they are, the 
shrewdest observers of Palestine life hold that what is needed is 
not the withdrawal of the Halukkah. as the impatient critic 



100 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



insists, but rather its increase, and that it be organized and 
applied wisely. But a thoroughgoing organization of the 
Halukkah implies a far-reaching reform " outside of the land " 
as well as in Palestine : Outside the methods of collection are 
questionable ; inside the methods of distribution. 

The Halukkah, it may not be forgotten, has a long history 
that accounts in part for its blemishes. By some its warrant is 
sought as far back as the Biblical custom of sending gifts to 
the Temple at Jerusalem. At all events, from the earliest 
days of the Dispersion the scattered sons of Israel voluntarily 
remembered the needs of the remnant in the home-land. 
Especially the academies were the object of their solicitude. 
Their contributions, at first a freewill offering, became a 
tribute, and when saints and scholars " returned " to Palestine, 
and founded settlements, they sent messengers abroad, to 
remind the others of the need of their " representatives " and 
their own duty in the premises. One of them, in the seven- 
teenth century, adduced the example of Christians toward their 
recluses in Palestine as worthy of imitation by Jews. 

This was the beginning of the system of Meshullahim. 
The messengers confined themselves at first to Turkey and 
Egypt. In the fifteenth century they went to European coun- 
tries, their chief centers being London, Amsterdam, Venice, 
and Leghorn. In the middle of the eighteenth century they 
extended their operations to the Levant, Germany, France, 
Eussia, Poland, and America. Ezra Stiles in his Diary men- 
tions three in the United States: , Moses Malkin in 1759, 
Hayyim Isaac Karigal in 1771-1773, and Samuel Cohen in 
1775. Before the end of another century the relation of the 
Meshullah to the Palestine community had been put on a 
definite business basis, and he had added South Africa and 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 1Q1 



Australia to his bailiwick. But scarcely had he made the 
whole Jewish world his sphere, when he began to lose caste. 
He came to be regarded widely as the sign of slipshod waste- 
fulness and disorganization. That he was at the same time 
the symbol of a cosmopolitan outlook, of invincible idealism 
on the part of the Jewish masses, and of a Jewish solidarity 
that mocked at physical dispersion — this counted for less and 
less as more developed means of communication brought the 
ends of the earth closer together, and dispelled the glamour 
of the Orient that had hung about the person of the messenger. 
The " begging letters," one of the developed means of commu- 
nication substituted for the human messenger, accorded no' 
better with the modern sense for order. So it came about 
that many Jews in Western Europe after 1860 made the 
Alliance Israelite Universelle their only Palestine almoners. 
It gave public accountings of its funds, a strong recommenda- 
tion, even if its undertakings had not been another. That — 
an auditing system — is the Halukkarr's prime requisite for 
the present in the centers of collection. 

The distribution of the Halukkah in Palestine has still more 
serious aspects. One is tempted to the paradox that it has 
never been so disorganizing as when it has set to work to 
organize itself. From the thirteenth to the eighteenth century 
the collections as well as the semi-annual distributions were 
wholly in the hands of the Sefardim. As a means of increasing 
their tribute the Ashkenazim separated from the Sefardim. 
Alone they could assert more vigorously their claim upon 
the support of their former Jewish countrymen, if not on 
religious, then on purely charitable grounds. The expe- 
dient was successful. The Ashkenazim themselves split 
up into groups according to their provenance. Now, after 



102 AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



a hundred years, there are at least thirty Ashkenazic 
Kolelim, " congregations/' some of them consisting of not 
more than a hundred members, as, for instance, the Kolel of 
Maramaros, a town in Hungary, and some of even a far 
smaller number. The Kolel im have their separate systems of 
collection and distribution, with separate Talmud Torahs, 
Yeshibot, conventicles or synagogues, and sometimes separate 
communal institutions, especially congregate houses in which 
their clients may live rent-free for given periods. 

The whole number of Halukkah recipients falls short of 
30,000, for whom, it is asserted, the Kolelim have at their 
disposal $300,000 annually. Other estimates put the figure 
at $600,000. Either sum compares well with the 10,000 lire 
reported by the seventeenth-century Meshullah mentioned 
before. In 1909 the Kolel Galizia alone distributed $63,036. 
However that may be, the sums are nevertheless not adequate 
to the need. According to a computation, made in 1912, there 
are Kolelim that dole out not more than $1.50 a year to their 
members; in one the annual stipend rises as high as $72. In 
making the distribution, some take into consideration the 
number of children in a family, so that no fair average can be 
struck. Only in the case of three Kolelim, comprising less 
than 3300 persons, does the individual quota insure even a 
meager living. 

The prevailing system thus necessitates the formation of a 
new Kolel by arrivals not fortunate enough to have been born 
in centers already represented by Kolelim, as rigid in their 
membership requirements as the medieval guild. The Sefar- 
dim are shut out entirely from the large Ashkenazic Haluk- 
kah system. They have their own still more inadequate 
Halukkah, drawn from Tripolis, Tunis, Morocco, and Egypt. 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 1Q3 



Their practice is to distribute the moneys only among their 
leaders, the Hakamim, and among widows and orphans. And 
both the Ashkenazic and Sefardic systems disregard the 
Yemenites, the Persians, and all the small Oriental groups. 

It is obvious that organization so understood must lead to 
injustice, jealousy, recrimination, and pauperization in the 
worst form, especially when it carries with it largely a system 
of bookkeeping in Palestine as well as in the centers of collec- 
tion that disregards the safeguard of publicity. In a word, a 
healthy, self-reliant, communal development is impossible. 
The only large urban Palestinian center in which Jewish social 
life approaches the normal is J affa. It is not the only one free 
from the Halukkah incubus, but being free from it, it is 
significant that it is the only one in which the Ashkenazic and 
Sefardic sections form a single community governed by a 
joint committee. 

Leaders of the Halukkah have themselves realized its grave 
defects. In 1866 a Waad ha-Kelali (Waad kol ha-Kolelim), a 
Central Committee of the Kolelim, was created, to represent 
the public interests common to all the Ashkenazim, as well as 
the interests of those in need of relief who have no Kol el 
attachment, always barring the Sefardim. For a short period, 
this Central Committee, acting under pressure with regard to 
the contributions from America, at that time not represented 
by a Kolel, did partial justice even to the Sefardim, and in 
1885 it introduced a revised system of bookkeeping with public 
accountings. 

The funds from America half a century ago came primarily 
from two societies, the North American Eelief Society for the 
Indigent Jews of Palestine (incorporated in 1853), and the 
New York Society for the Eelief of the Poor in Palestine. 



104 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



Their activities were supplemented by general collections. In 
time the number of American applicants to the Halukkah 
increased, and after much opposition the American Kolel, 
Tiferet Yerushalaim, was formed in 1895. The revenues 
from the United States and Canada all go to the Waad ha- 
Kelali. It devotes two-thirds to general purposes, and one- 
third is paid out to the 485 persons comprising the American 
Kolel. This surprisingly public-spirited arrangement was 
probably suggested by the circumstance that most of the con- 
tributors on this side of the Atlantic are recent immigrants 
from the centers that support the earlier Kolelim, which ought 
not to be made to suffer by the accident of a change of habita- 
tion on the part of the givers. The amount of the American 
collection is not known, though there are sure indications that 
it is large. At all events, the American Kolel is one of the 
three that grants an income to its members halfway adequate 
for decent living, though it is not the richest. That distinc- 
tion belongs to the one called HoD, an abbreviation for Hol- 
land-Deutschland (Germany). With the Hungarian Kolel 
HoD shares another distinction, that of having adopted an 
improved system, partly of auditing, partly of distribution, 
partly of general government. 

The Waad ha-Kelali has not remained master of the situa- 
tion even so far as America is concerned. That came about 
in this way: Kolel lines are drawn to mark not only geo- 
graphical, but also religious groupings. The HaBaD (the 
initial letters of the three Hebrew words for wisdom, under- 
standing, and knowledge) is a Hasidic body. The other 
Ashkenazim are Perushim. Recognizing that immigration 
had taken a large Hasidic constituency to America, the HaBaD 
cut loose from the Waad ha-Kelali, and arranged to make 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 105 



independent appeals to the American Jews under what may 
be described as its jurisdiction. In other words, though 
Dvinsk, Minsk, and Pinsk, for example, are represented by 
Kolelim, the Hasidim of these cities pay allegiance to the 
HaBaD. 

The disorganizing influence of the Halukkah affects Tibe- 
rias, Safed, and Hebron, with their 20,000 Jews, as it affects 
Jerusalem with its 50,000. They too have their divisions 
and subdivisions and separate and multiplied institutions, and 
the poverty in all is abject. 

In picturing the communal situation in Jerusalem — the 
typical " holy city 99 — one must not forget that the " division 99 
of funds among their constituencies does not exhaust the 
activities of the Kolelim. They support Yeshibot, Talmud 
Torahs, and synagogues ; sometimes they have their own — for 
instance, the Hungarian Kolel has three Yeshibot. They 
maintain almshouses, which will be dealt with presently. A 
few have loan societies, one of them specifically for the bene- 
fit of mechanics ; some provide medical service ; one has a 
clinic: the Kolel Galizia performs the duties of a Hebra 
Kadisha for the scholars in the community; finally, some 
assign support to the philanthropic institutions, the hospitals, 
the orphan asylums, and the Old Folks' Homes. These insti- 
tutions, however, derive only the smallest part of their income 
from the Kolelim. Most of it comes direct to them from the 
outside, either through general collections made specifically for 
them or from the societies that have founded them, as, for 
example, is the case with the German hospital Shaare Zedek 
and the Eye Clinic Le-Maan Zion, both originated and cared 
for by societies having their seat in Frankfort-on-the-Main. 
In all it is computed that the revenues of the Old Settlement, 



106 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



its Kolelim and its institutions, reach the sum of $1,000,000 
annually. 

In Jerusalem there are four hospitals, as many orphan 
asylums, an insane asylum, two Old Folks' Homes, a blind 
asylum, and the eye-clinic just mentioned. Jaffa has an 
inadequate hospital; Haifa a new one, small but well-con- 
ducted; Safed has a hospital building, unequipped and there- 
fore unavailable; Hebron is about to replace its small build- 
ing by one larger and better; Tiberias is wholly destitute of 
hospital facilities, only comparatively recently the HoD has 
been stationing physicians and nurses there ; finally, several of 
the colonies have hospital buildings. In Jerusalem the Ash- 
kenazim have their own institutions, and the Sefardim theirs, 
but neither, nor the two together, can " compete " with the 
opportunities offered by the missionaries. Not a single one of 
their institutions — they are all indispensable — is equal to the 
legitimate calls made upon it. Most of them are unsatisfactory 
as to equipment and administration ; and if the appointments 
in one or another meet the requirements of science and human- 
ity, it is sure not to be sufficiently endowed to take in as many 
applicants as its space permits. There is not one that is not 
a monument to the selfless devotion of one or many individuals, 
and there is not one that is not struggling under a burden of 
accumulated debt or a lamentably insufficient income. 

The oldest charity in Jerusalem is the Kuppat-Tamhui, a 
public kitchen. For reasons growing out of conditions in the 
city and in the land the distribution of free meals is funda- 
mentally a necessary institution. Many of the schools, the 
Talmud Torahs and some of the modern institutions as well, 
provide them for their pupils. Along this line the most notable 
contribution to Palestinian charity in latter years has been 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 107 



made from America, in the Nathan Straus Soup Kitchen, or 
Belief Station, which, since 1912, has been dispensing food 
daily, including Matzot at Passover, to from four to five hun- 
dred of the old, the feeble, and the sick folk of Jerusalem. 
The utility of this work has been demonstrated particularly 
since the war cut Palestine off from the revenues usually 
flowing into the land from Central Europe and Eussia. It 
is reported that since last August the usual number of bene- 
ficiaries of the Straus Soup Kitchen has been increased to at 
least a thousand a day. 

Another recent undertaking is the Visiting Nurses' Settle- 
ment of the American Women's Zionist organization Hadassah. 
It has established a midwives' service, enabling Jewish women 
to refrain from resorting to the English Missionary Hospital, 
the only maternite in Jerusalem. Besides, its two nurses and 
several caretakers are detailed for duty in nineteen schools, 
to look after the general health of the pupils, more particularly 
to take care of their eyes, by way of supplementing the work of 
the Le-Maan Zion Eye Clinic, whose physician directs the 
examinations for trachoma and other eye diseases in the 
schools; and general district nursing is done by them at the 
Settlement and in all parts of the city under the direction 
of the physician of the Eothschild Hospital. The organization 
is supported by groups of men and women in Chicago and 
Pittsburgh as well as by its own Zionist branches, and that it 
could put its plans into operation in Jerusalem and have two 
nurses at work there at the time when this came about, was 
due to the personal co-operation and the substantial support 
of Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Straus, who, besides, fitted up the 
Settlement House in Jerusalem. The ultimate object of the 
Society is the establishment of a Nurses' Training School. 



108 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



When the New Settlement arrived in the " eighties," the 
Jerusalem they came to was to all intents and purposes the 
city described above. A few of the charitable institutions 
enumerated have been founded since then, and a few Kolelim 
have sprung up, but on the whole the communal traditions 
were fixed. Occupied with the complexities of its own situa- 
tion, the New Settlement could not be expected to tackle the 
older abuses. In one respect, however, it was forced to take 
immediate action, but there, it happens, the Old Settlement 
had done preliminary work, in which an American had an 
initial share. 

Nothing in Palestine, in city or in country, has been more 
serious than the housing problem, and that seems to have been 
understood or divined by Judah Touro, the American philan- 
thropist, who died in 1854. In his will, he left a sum of 
$60,000 as a trust fund for the erection of almshouses in 
Jerusalem. The trust was administered by Sir Moses Monte- 
fiore and the North American Eelief Society for the Indigent 
Jews of Jerusalem. This explains why the group of twenty or 
more dwellings to the southwest of Jerusalem is known as 
the " Montefiore Almshouses," instead of by Judah Touro's 
name. 

The noteworthy implications are that nearly sixty years ago 
it should have been discerned that a fundamental need was 
dwellings for the Jews, and that the trustees of Judah 
Touro's bequest should have had the sagacity and perhaps the 
boldness to build the hospices beyond the walls that mark the 
boundaries of the Inner City, several miles away from the 
specific J ewish quarter. This original " Montefiore Colony," 
with its windmill making it a landmark, has remained all 
but an isolated group on the Hebron road. But on the 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 109 



Jaffa road, leading westward from the city, and to the north 
beyond the Damascus Gate, Jewish " colony " after Jewish 
" colony " has arisen, until the Jewish city beyond the walls 
is three times as large as the city within the walls. 

To know what this expansion means one must have been in 
the dark courts within courts, with their cave-like, windowless 
dwellings, in the Maghrebi (Moroccan) quarter in the Inner 
City, or in the underground chambers in Tiberias into which 
men and women and their children and their herds of goats 
disappear together as night falls. 

The " Montefiore Colony v pointed the way in two directions. 
The almshouse idea was taken up by the Kolelim. Many of 
them have built and now maintain congregate houses or hos- 
pices. The HaBaD has nine in different parts of .the city; the 
Grodno Kolel has two, one in the city, one beyond the walls. 
In most instances the regulation is that a family may occupy 
one of these " cells " rent-free for a period of three years. 
Then it must vacate the little shelter to make room for another 
applicant. The wealthier Kolelim build separate houses, 
grouped together in one locality : the Warsaw Kolel has 68 such 
houses, the Hungarian 240. In most instances the Kolelim 
have received special donations for the purpose. Three Amer- 
icans, Marks Nathan, of Chicago, Moses Alexander and Moses 
M. Yodner, of New York, are responsible the first for 50 
houses, the second for 20, and the third for 20. 

There are, in addition, other " colonies," which are wholly 
independent of the Kolelim and of charity. They antedate the 
New Settlement, but they have multiplied greatly with it and 
through it. The largest and one of the earliest of this type is 
Meah Shearim, " the hundred-gated," begun in 1860. A 
group of a hundred men formed an association with dues of 



110 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



about $40 annually; land was bought and ten houses built 
each year. As soon as ten were ready for occupancy they were 
assigned to the members by lot. Those provided with houses 
paid rent amounting to 20$ of their former annual contribu- 
tion, while the rest continued to pay the full quota. After 
all were housed, the surplus was used for public improvements, 
for keeping the streets in repair, building a synagogue and 
bath, but particularly erecting a wall around the Settlement, 
the gates of which were locked at night — an indication of the 
danger of living outside of the walls in those days. The 
original hundred tenants have been more than doubled, and 
the Meah Shearim mutual building association has had many 
imitators. Later on the idea was taken up as a business 
venture, and speculation in land and buildings became rife. 

Similar to Meah Shearim are the four " colonies " — a mis- 
nomer that has established itself in Palestinian parlance — that 
have been built with the aid of the Testimonial Fund to Sir 
Moses Montefiore, which at his urgence was devoted to public 
works for the improvement of the condition of the Jews in 
the Holy Land. Its revenues have been applied partly as a 
loan fund to the purpose of house-building. A non-interest 
bearing loan is granted to a building association, the amount 
varying in proportion to the association's own capital. The 
loan is to be returned in fifteen years, the first installment being 
payable in five years. In its time the Anglo-Palestine Bank 
entered the field on somewhat the same plan, and earlier the 
ICA on its own account put up workingmen's houses primarily 
for the employees of the Alliance weaving establishment. The 
ICA " colony/' called Nahalat Zion, first contemplated thirty 
houses ; the great number of applicants compelled an enlarge- 
ment of the plan. The tenants are given the chance of becom 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE m 



ing the owners on easy terms. Naturally all such colonies are 
provided with cisterns, a sewer system, and other public im- 
provements. A second quarter, Nahalat Zadok, erected by the 
ICA, on a different plan, has in view business men as tenants. 

Another sort of " colonies " owes its existence to the 
tendency of Jews from one or another city or country to flock 
together. Thus arose the various Yemenite quarters, the 
Persian quarter, sometimes referred to as the Tin Quarter, 
a part of the building material being Standard Oil Company's 
cans, the Urfali quarter, and the only handsome one, the 
Bokhara quarter, in which there are " residences " built as 
wealth and taste dictate. 

In Jaffa the housing-problem was equally acute. Here the 
Sefardic Jews had exercised foresight. Long ago they went 
forth from the two Jewish quarters of the town, and secured 
plots on the sandy shores of the Mediterranean. Their pru- 
dence has been rewarded. After the opening of the Jaffa- 
Jerusalem road in 1892, the city spread phenomenally. In 
1881 there had been 10,000 inhabitants; in 1892, 23,000, and 
at present their number exceeds 60,000. Eents leaped higher 
and higher. A co-operative building association was formed 
by Jews in 1906. Nothing was done until, in 1909, the 
National Fund, making another departure from its original 
policy, extended a loan of $48,000 to the Ahuzat Bayyit. As 
though by magic there grew up a Jewish suburb, Tel-Abib, 
of which a traveler writes : " I must confess that I have not 
seen anywhere in the Orient (including Cairo) so healthy, 

dustless, trim, and beautiful a quarter It owes its 

existence to money and organizing talent. It is Hebrew all 
the way through, and it is amazing to see the self-possession 
of these hitherto cowed Russian Jews. The erect carriage 



112 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



of the younger generation is admirable. Their melancholy 
expression is disappearing. One sees handsome, gay people, 
enthusiastic and industrious. The children were frolicking on 
the streets, in masks — it was Purim." .... 

Tel-Abib is a wholly Jewish suburb shut off from traffic 
from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. The 
streets are lined with trees, the water supply is ample, the 
concrete houses are square-set and surrounded by garden 
plots, and the public improvements are modern. With the 
city of Jaffa twenty minutes off, the suburb by the sea is con- 
nected by means of an omnibus, running every ten minutes. 
Many of the public buildings of the Jaffa Jewish community 
are there: the great schools, the Palestine Office, and the 
office of the Odessa Committee, and others are contemplated: 
a synagogue, a hospital, a hotel, and a Jewish " city-hall," 
for the transaction of all matters of business between the 
Turkish Government and the Jewish community. The chief 
official that conducts the Governmental business is called 
mukhtar, as in the colonies. Hitherto his functions have been 
confined to dealings with the Jews of Ottoman citizenship, but 
since the system of Capitulations has been abrogated, his 
sphere must be considerably larger. And if Ottomanization 
increases among Jews as heretofore, a community like that of 
Tel-Abib will soon, under the Turkish administrative system, 
have its own Mayor and large liberties in municipal regulation. 
For its internal affairs, Tel-Abib has a Waad of seven, chosen 
at a general assembly of all the residents, whether owners of 
houses or lots or only tenants, provided they have rented and 
occupied two rooms and a kitchen for at least a year. There 
are considerably more than a thousand residents, and the 
budget for 1913 was $3618. 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE H3 

Tel-Abib has not appeased the house-hunger of the Jaffa 
Jews. The gymnasium has drawn to the city a large number 
of Eussian Jews who desire to give their children an education. 
They clamor for dwellings almost as insistently as the 
Yemenites. Already a second quarter, Nahalat Benjamin, has 
been undertaken for artisans, clerks, and merchants. It is 
adjacent to Tel-Abib, and again the National Fund has 
extended credit to the builders. The criticism has been made 
that the conditions of the contracts between the members of the 
building association and the National Fund operating through 
the bank have not been sufficiently exacting. Though Tel-Abib 
is handsome and hygienically constructed, it is so by a happy 
accident. The critics of the National Fund desire truly 
" restricted suburbs," in which the loan-extending body shall 
take upon itself the functions of a municipality, regulating the 
width of the streets, the height of the houses, the construction 
of the drainage system, etc. Above all there has been adverse 
criticism on the score of the National Fund's having omitted 
to determine the time within which houses should be erected 
on the plots acquired with its loans. The result of the omis- 
sion is that some of the building lots have remained unim- 
proved, and the land has risen to three or four times its first 
value. Thus the National Fund has aided its clients, not to 
secure a home, which was its object, but to make a snug profit 
through speculation, while many would-be residents had per- 
force to be turned away. 

A second building association, operating under private 
auspices, contemplates a quarter on land bought from the 
Geulah. Its plan is to connect Tel-Abib with the two old Jew- 
ish quarters in Jaffa proper. The buildings will be constructed 
for business purposes, with a view to the need of merchants. 



114 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



Finally, in 1913, work was begun in the suburb Hebrah 
Hadashah, close to Tel-Abib, with its main street to run along 
the Mediterranean shore. 

The " restricted suburb " idea may be realized in Haifa, 
where the quarter Herzelia has been started on the side of 
Carmel by the building association Ahawat Ahim. It pur- 
chased its land from the Eeal Estate Company Palastina, a 
share company with rigid regulations. Parcels of land, if not 
improved within a stated period, may be bought back by the 
company on stipulated terms. The owners of lots must agree 
to contribute to certain public expenditures, as police, water, 
sewer, illumination, streets, park, and taxes. The height of the 
houses and their other dimensions are limited, and their place 
is defined in relation to the street. The purchaser undertakes 
not to maintain a factory, shop, or store on his premises, and to 
build his outhouses with due regard to cleanliness and health. 
In case of sale, the Real Estate Company has the first option, 
and if it does not exercise it, and the house and lot are sold 
to a third party, he must be made to accept the regulations 
agreed to by the original owner, or the sale is invalid. 

Herzelia is well under way. Some of the houses were com- 
pleted a few years ago, and no sooner finished than they were 
occupied. It has a Jewish hotel, too, one of the desiderata in 
all the J ewish centers in Palestine. 

Soon J erusalem will have in addition to its " colonies " a 
modern suburb, like Haifa's Herzelia and Jaffa's Tel-Abib, 
Nahalat Benjamin, Shaarayim, and Hebrah Hadashah. Steps 
have already been taken to build it. Then Safed and Tiberias 
will not be able to resist long. The modern spirit will pierce 
to them and make of them abodes worthy of the charms that 
nature has conferred upon them — the one perched high in 




RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE H5 



rugged Galilee, the other set on the shores of the azure, hill- 
girt Harp-Lake. 

If Tiberias refuses to follow the example set by her sister 
" holy city " Jerusalem, her stubbornness will have to yield to 
the changes encroaching upon her borders. Already a motor 
boat plies between the town at the northwestern end of the Sea 
and Semakh, the railroad station of the Haifa-Damascus Kail- 
road at the southern end. The same railroad is about to throw 
out a branch southward from Merhawiah, and connect Haifa 
with Nablus and Jerusalem. Not far from Semakh is the 
National Fund Farm Kinneret, one part of which is a 
peninsula extending into the Jordan, the site of the ancient 
city of Tarichaea. There, at Kerak, the Palestine Land Devel- 
opment Company is planning a winter resort. In twenty 
minutes by motor boat, the visitors may reach the hot springs 
lying on the western shore of the Sea south of Tiberias, between 
it and Kinneret. To the north, opposite Kerak, across the Sea, 
and beyond the Upper Galilean hills and the Lebanon range, 
rises the snow-capped Hermon, while all around a tropical 
vegetation grows rank. From the ten or more Galilean colonies 
milk, eggs, butter, poultry, and vegetables can easily be 
brought, not only to the tourists at Kerak, but also to the puny 
babies at Tiberias in the dark, slimy, vaulted streets or in the 
cave-like chambers below the level of the street. When Tiberias 
was founded, it was declared unclean, because it was the site 
of a cemetery. It became later the synonym for the study and 
the interpretation of the law; the seat of legend hallowed by 
the memory of Eabbi Meir Baal ha-Ness; the reputed burial- 
place of great scholars; and the refuge of saints and mystics. 
To-day its heritage is, besides the Halukkah collected in 
the Eabbi Meir Baal ha-Ness "pushkes," only malaria and 



116 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



misery; it is unclean because it is in the clutches of dire 
poverty. The currents of the young Palestinian Jewish life 
should soon gather impetus enough to sweep away all this 
hideousness, and in restoring beauty and charm to their own 
revitalize the traditions of the place into modern motive forces. 

The housing problem shares the place of prime importance 
in the Palestinian cities with the problem of creating oppor- 
tunities for work. The retail business is naturally restricted. 
In J affa and Haifa many of the shops on the main streets are 
in Jewish hands. In Jerusalem there are stationers, druggists, 
clothing, dry goods, and linen merchants, dealers in building 
materials (largely cement in recent years), booksellers, dealers 
in olive wood and other souvenirs, and of course dealers in 
Jewish religious articles. There are also five insurance offices 
and several private banks. 

To the Alliance Israelite Universelle belongs the credit for 
having taken the first effective step towards the introduction 
of handicrafts. As early as 1882 it opened a well-equipped and 
adequately subsidized trade school in J erusalem, for carpentry, 
cabinet-making, wood-carving, weaving, dyeing, machine con- 
struction, and all sorts of smithies — blacksmithing, copper- 
smithing, and locksmithing. The object was to train appren- 
tices, and its success has been admirable so far as the manual 
skill of its graduates is concerned. Unfortunately the spirit 
that sent so many of the pupils of the Alliance Agricultural 
School at Mikweh Israel out of Palestine, prevailed here too, 
and with the same deplorable result. The girls' industrial 
school was of more benefit to the community, though the hair 
net industry, dressmaking, and embroidery, the subjects 
taught, afford only a pittance. 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE H7 



The next attempt at industrial training was not made for 
nearly a quarter of a century. In the interval there had been 
great progress. Mr. Boris Schatz, in his Bezalel School for 
arts and crafts, keeps his eye constantly on the land and the 
material he has to deal with. The consequence is that instead 
of exporting trained men, he exports goods. He teaches carpet- 
weaving, filigree silver work, beaten copper and brass work, 
ivory carving, lithography, lace-making, and other related 
subjects. In a few years his school, which is built on National 
Fund land and with the assistance of the National Fund, 
occupied 430 persons, who earned, in 1912, $27,000 in wages, 
while the sale of the products amounted to $50,000. Their 
work, as in the Alliance school, is sold, the Society backing 
Mr. Schatz's efforts having succeeded in securing a market for 
his wares in a number of the large European centers. In the 
school building there are two Jewish museums, one of Jewish 
antiquities and art objects, the other a collection of the flora 
and fauna of Palestine, the only natural history museum in 
Palestine proper. To these two museums the pupils are taught 
to resort for the motives to be elaborated in their work. In 
both schools a beneficial change has recently been made, by 
which the educational undertaking is separated from the 
industrial. The Bezalel Workshops, Ltd., is to be conducted 
wholly on a commercial basis. 

It will be recalled that the Bezalel co-operated with the 
National Fund in establishing an industrial colony at Ben 
Shamen, where twelve families of Yemenites are securing a 
livelihood by means of truck-farming as well as filigree work 
and carpet-weaving. So also in Jerusalem the Bezalel has 
introduced home industries. Carpet- weaving is done at the 
homes of some of the workers, and the needle lace peculiar to 



118 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



the Orient at others. For the introduction of the latter, not 
only in Jerusalem, but also in Jaffa, Safed, and Tiberias, credit 
is due to the Verband jiidischer Frauen fiir Kulturarbeit in 
Palastina. About four hundred girls are engaged in the 
industry, earning from forty to seventy-five cents a week, and 
the most skilled forty cents a day. The same needle lace, 
together with embroidery, dressmaking, and plain sewing, is 
taught also at the Evelina de Rothschild School, and in the 
Alliance Girls' Schools throughout the country. 

In the Bezalel filigree and copper and brass workshops, as 
well as in the Alliance weaving establishment, Yemenites are 
employed in large numbers. Here as in the colonies they are 
docile, skillful, and industrious. They bring artisan habits 
with them from Arabia ; there too they were carpenters, masons, 
blacksmiths, goldsmiths, tanners, metal workers, and shoe- 
makers. It is the merit of a Christian woman, Mrs. Finn, the 
widow of the sometime British Consul to Jerusalem, to have 
been the first to find work for the quick fingers of the Yemen- 
ites. On her beautiful property close to Jerusalem called 
Abraham's Vineyard, she has been employing Yemenites since 
first they came to Palestine, in the quarry there and in the little 
olive soap factory. By the way it should be noted that some of 
the masonry work in Palestine is done by Jews, especially by 
the Yemenites. 

The idea of industrial opportunity and industrial training 
has taken root. Mr. Nathan Straus established, in 1913, in 
connection with his Eelief Station, workshops for unskilled 
persons. They were taught to make mother-of-pearl beads, 
a profitable industry up to that time carried on exclusively by 
the people of Bethlehem, who had guarded the secret of their 
manufacture jealously. From beads the step was taken to 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 



119 



the making of pearl buttons, which appeal to a larger market 
than that created by the tourist. The shop gives work to a 
considerable number of the unemployed. The hope is that 
the undertaking will in time be self-supporting. 

The women of the Ezrat Xashini Society of Jerusalem have 
opened industrial and domestic training classes for girls ; and 
in Safed the B'nai B ? rith established a manual training school. 

Three other attempts at industrial training should be men- 
tioned more explicitly, because they are the creations of the 
Halukkah circles on their own behalf. In Jaffa, in 1906, a 
handicrafts school, Bet XTelakak, was organized by an orthodox 
society. Shomre Tor ah. for youths of indifferent endowment 
and taste for Talmud study. Besides the lessons in the iron- 
forge and the carpenter's shop, they are taught drawing, 
mathematics, physics, etc.. and only a few hours a day are 
devoted to the Talmud. The school has manufactured large 
and expensive iron pieces of workmanlike character. Jeru- 
salem followed the example of Jaffa. In 190 3, the HoD 
established the Darke Hayyini, a manual trade school on the 
same lines as the Jaffa school. Finally, the lEahaseh le- 
Yetomim. better known as the Diskin Orphanage, a Kolel 
institution in every sense and implication of the word, has 
opened three classes, for tailoring, shoemaking, and Torah- 
writing. This is the application of Halukkah funds that 
friends of Palestine now have in mind, and that should go 
hand in hand with their increase, if the blot on Palestine life 
is ever to be wiped off. As one writer phrases it, " The 
Halukkah must help to abolish the Halukkah." 

The ICA also has made a small contribution to the industrial 
development of Jerusalem, by furnishing knitting machines 
on easy terms, and a large contribution, by establishing a loan 
4 



120 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



bank for merchants and artisans. The figures for 1911 rela- 
tive to the latter are instructive : On January 1, there were 
501 borrowers on its books ; of these 143 paid up wholly by the 
end of the year their indebtedness of $5248. In the meantime 
there were 170 new borrowers, who, with the 358 left over, 
owed the bank $22,271.76. Of the 170 new borrowers, 86 
were Ashkenazim, 48 Sefardim, and 36 Yemenites, 63 being 
merchants, as against 107 artisans. 

What could have been the trades of these one hundred and 
seven artisans ? According to the report of the French consul 
for 1907-1908, quoted by Mr. Nawratzki, there were six thou- 
sand Jewish workmen in Jerusalem : joiners, masons, painters, 
cobblers, tailors, turners, printers, bookbinders, millers, 
weavers, goldsmiths, watchmakers, saddlers, wagon-builders, 
mattress-makers, carvers, paperhangers, coppersmiths, Sefer 
Torah scribes, etc. Their wages, the reporter maintains, 
ranged from ten cents a day for glaziers to $1.50 for masons, 
weavers, and founders. 

In the country at large there are various industries in Jewish 
hands, but all conducted on a small scale: In Artuf oil is 
extracted from the thyme that grows wild there; the Petah 
Tikwah experiment with geraniums has been mentioned; in 
other colonies the castor oil plant is cultivated for commercial 
purposes, and oil is extracted from sesame and olives. In 
Jaffa, in Jerusalem, in Beer-Sheba, the last only lately be- 
ginning to attain to importance, there are mills in Jewish 
hands. Jaffa has a machine shop, a furniture factory, a tan- 
nery, and motor works. In Haifa there is a foundry. Near 
Eamleh a Jew has a lime-kiln. The wine and cognac industry 
of the colonies has been described. Connected with it is the 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 121 

manufacture of the barrels needed, as the manufacture of 
boxes goes with the orange industry. The dairy industries are 
growing. Safed is delivering cheese to Haifa and to Jeru- 
salem. The Lower Galilean colonies are sending all kinds of 
dairy products to Haifa. Kecently, when, on account of con- 
ditions incidental to the war, Daganiah on the Sea of Tiberias 
was cut off from its market at Haifa, the colonists adjusted 
themselves quickly to the situation. Instead of using the 
railroad westward from Semakh, they used it eastward, and 
transported the stock on hand to Damascus. 

These are outward signs of normality. That there is an 
inner rapprochement between the two Settlements auguring 
well for an undivided communal life rests upon many intang- 
ible manifestations. Formerly the " dying colony " was only 
a thorn in the side of the New Settlement. It is now prepared 
to admit that without the deep religious enthusiasm of its 
predecessor, the progress it is proud of, costly as it has been 
in respect of every form of human devotion, might have re- 
quired a thousand times more sacrifices. It recognizes that the 
Old Settlement has performed the valuable service of linking 
the New Settlement with the Jewish past in the Jewish land, 
just as for centuries it had performed the other valuable service 
of linking the Jewries of the world with one another through 
the Jewish land. The Old Settlement, in turn, is relenting 
towards the method and content of modern instruction. Ex- 
communications are not so frequent as formerly. The Kolelim 
themselves are encouraging trade education instead of threat- 
ening the withdrawal of the Halukkah from those whose 
children follow a secular occupation. Eabbi M. Lerner, of 
Altona, has organized the Moriah " for the promotion of the 



122 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



agricultural colonization of Palestine on an orthodox religious 
basis." The Old Settlement realizes that its cherished object, 
intense Jewishness in life and thought, is not subserved by 
forcing all its youths to the Talmudic studies for which many 
are not fitted. Above all it is conceded, even by some who are 
concerned officially, that the Halukkah, the source of most of 
the friction, stands in need of reform, and the existence of the 
Mizrahi party within the Zionist movement is a guarantee of 
future co-operation and amalgamation between the two sec- 
tions of the community. 

There have been signs of progress even in the matter of 
centralized organization. As was mentioned before, the Jaffa 
community is a unit. Sefardim and Ashkenazim act together. 
In Jerusalem, a few years ago, the collapse of one of the 
largest charitable institutions produced an acute crisis in com- 
munal affairs. The Waad ha-Kelali saw an opportunity in 
favor of compacter organization. It appointed an executive 
committee, a Waad ha-Ir, a city council. The move turned 
out to be premature, chiefly because the new body had no funds 
to apportion, as had been contemplated. But even the failure 
is instructive as an indication of the temper of the leaders. 
During the still acuter crisis produced by the present war, if 
the reports that have reached the outside world suffice as a basis 
for inferences, Jerusalem has learnt the need of a centralized 
life. Bitter necessity may be welding the community into a 
unit. To be sure, even though the immediate effect of hard- 
ships be as satisfactory as described, it would be rash to jump 
to the conclusion that the Kolel barriers are down for always. 
The report is adduced only to show the trend that does actually 
exist toward unified Jewish action. 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 123 



THE CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 

Important Place of Palestine Cultural Development — Talmud 
Torahs — Lamel School — Modernized Talmud Torahs — Hebrew 
as the Language of Instruction — Hebrew in the Villages — 
Alliance Israelite Universelle — Evelina de Rothschild School 
— Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden: Kindergartens — Second- 
ary Schools — Higher Education — Higher Education in Jaffa — 
Mizrahi School: Tahkemoni — Two New Settlement Schools 
in Jerusalem — Jewish Institute for Technical Education — 
Zionist Hebrew Schools — The Yeshibot — Teachers' Union — 
Libraries — Conservatories of Music — The Press — Publication 
Societies — Propaganda for Sanitation — Jerusalem Water 
Supply. 

Since time immemorial " dry " masonry has been in vogue in 
Palestine. Wieldy blocks of the various kinds of stone, chalky 
and basalt, quarried in the country are piled upon and next 
to one another, with no sort of cement between them. The 
method is still employed, particularly for inclosures. Eural 
colonization, urban economic progress, industries, philan- 
thropies, are such a dry-masonry structure of Palestinian 
life. The mortar is supplied by its intellectual manifestations. 

First and most important naturally is the educational system 
in the restricted pedagogic sense. 

The Yeshibot and the Talmud Torahs are as old as the Pal- 
estinian Jewish Settlement itself. In a sense they .are the 
raison d'etre of its existence. Jewish lore and research were 
to have a home peculiarly their own. The Kolelim stint their 
members to maintain the schools. They go further ; they estab- 
lish new ones in the face of the poverty of their constituents. 
There is hardly a choice in the matter. As the outlying " col- 
onies " spring up, miles distant from the Inner City, they must 
be provided with school facilities. The Halukkah supporters 
abroad abet the Kolelim in this purpose with at least as much 
effectiveness as in their relief work. But the zeal and the need 



124 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



of the Kolelim outstrip the interest or the means of those to 
whom they appeal, for no cry from Palestine comes so insist- 
ently as the cry for funds for the Yeshibot and the Talmud 
Torahs. 

Of Talmud Torahs there are in Jerusalem nine, with from 
three to four thousand pupils, taught by upwards of one 
hundred and fifty teachers. The Sefardim have their own, the 
oldest of all ; the Perushim among the Ashkenazim have theirs, 
the largest of all, one with eight branches in as many " col- 
onies"; since 1886 the Hasidim have one, and so have the 
Maghrebim, the Persians, the Yemenites, the Bokharans, and 
the Grusinians. The Sefardic is the only one that deviates 
from the curriculum of the usual type of Talmud Torah. It 
adds Turkish, Arabic, and arithmetic to the Jewish religious 
branches. The language of instruction is Yiddish in the 
German institutions, Ladino, or Spagniol, in the Sefardic, 
and Persian and Arabic in the others. Eecently one of the 
Sefardic schools has adopted Hebrew. The guess may be 
hazarded that the sum total of the income of all together 
does not exceed $35,000. 

According to Nawratzki, there are in Jaffa 8 such Talmud 
Torahs ; in Hebron, 4 ; in Haifa, 1 ; in Tiberias, 2 ; and in 
Safed, 4; with 1380 pupils and 71 teachers. 

The first protest against the system of instruction espoused 
by the Talmud Torah, which denied absolutely the need of 
even the most rudimentary secular education, was the Lamel 
School (1856), mentioned in the introduction to this article. 
The school was excommunicated by the Ashkenazic leaders, but 
it received a warm welcome from the Sefardim, to whom its 
European equipment must have made it a children's Paradise 
after their Arab Kuttab, lacking light physically and method 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 125 

spiritually. For over thirty years the Sefardim availed them- 
selves of the opportunities it offered. Then, much depleted in 
attendance, it was attached for a short time to the orphan 
asylum founded by Frankfort Jews, and in 1911 it passed 
under the jurisdiction of the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden 
as its Jerusalem boys' school. 

The protest embodied in the Lamel School entered Jerusa- 
lem from the outside. Ten years later, in 1866, something in 
the nature of a revolt from the inside brought about the estab- 
lishment of the Bet ha-Midrash Doresh Zion, known in Jeru- 
salem, from its founder, as the Blumenthal School. It had 
two peculiarities, one pedagogic, the other fiscal. It made the 
study of a European language compulsory, and it had a sinking 
fund to draw upon. The revolt fared no better than the pro- 
test : excommunication by the Ashkenazim, acceptance and use 
by the Sefardim. Since 1911 the school is under the direction 
of the HoD. The change of management will probably bring 
it into line with the educational policy of the Freie Verein- 
igung fur die Interessen des orthodoxen Judentums. This 
Frankfort organization has been operating in the Holy Land 
since 1909. It maintains an educational director, and has 
established Talmud Torah schools in Petah Tikwah, Eishon 
le-Zion, Ekron, Katra, and Haifa, in some of these places 
supplanting former institutions of the kind, in others add- 
ing a second to the one existing before. Besides these boys' 
schools it has girls' schools in Petah Tikwah and Ekron, the 
former equipped with the domestic training outfit described in 
a previous section. Its system of schools aims to keep in view 
modern Palestinian needs; the pupils are even given a modi- 
cum of agricultural training; the pedagogic methods are up- 
to-date ; it has put up several suitable school buildings ; and it 



126 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



conducts a teachers' course at Petah Tikwah, which is the seat 
of the director. 

The Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden is also contributing to 
the inner reform of the Talmud Torah in contrast to the 
laissez-faire policy once thought inevitable. For the purpose it 
is subsidizing two Talmud Torahs, one at Hebron, the other, 
the Grusinian, at Jerusalem. In the latter it had the co- 
operation of the Odessa Committee. The curriculum has been 
modernized by the introduction of Arabic and arithmetic, and 
the religious subjects are taught systematically. 

In the new Talmud Torahs of the Frankfort Society and in 
those supported by the Hilfsverein the language of instruction 
is Hebrew. With its adoption they ranged themselves among 
the forces that are determining the new order in Palestine, for 
the new order is committed irrevocably to Hebrew as the Jewish 
vernacular. Every modern educational agency has come to 
acknowledge this, and has modified its program accordingly. 

After a quarter of a century the Alliance Israelite Univer- 
selle took up the innovation represented by the Lamel School. 
In its elementary and secondary schools, it unhappily com- 
mitted the same mistake as at Mikweh Israel and in its Techni- 
. cal School. They were not redolent of the soil. The most cry- 
ing evil that resulted was a deplorable confusion pedagogically 
speaking. A fundamental difficulty in the East is the multi- 
plicity of languages. The child spends so much time and 
effort in acquainting itself with the media of education, that 
it rarely reaches the substance. The linguistic attainments of 
the Levantine are held up to admiration, but they have their 
drawbacks. With Arabic as the language of the land, and 
Turkish the official language, the problem in Palestine is at 
best difficult. The Alliance drew the Gordian knot still tighter 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 127 

by making French the language of instruction in the schools. 
The fashion was set for modern outside agencies. When the 
Anglo- Jewish Association, in 1898, took over the Evelina de 
Rothschild School, the medium became English, and when the 
Hilf sverein came into the land at the beginning of the century, 
it gave a prominent place to German. It is all the more signifi- 
cant of the current of events that nevertheless each of these 
successive agencies allotted more and more time to Hebrew 
than its predecessor. The Evelina de Rothschild laid greater 
stress upon it than the Alliance, and the Hilfsverein more 
than co-ordinated it with German. Even the Alliance has 
had to modify its scheme, though, to be sure, it is the subven- 
tion of the Odessa Committee that maintains a number of its 
Hebrew teachers. 

Meantime the people were deciding the language question in 
their own way. Circumstances forced the colonists to conduct 
their schools on the simplest basis. The teachers came not from 
France, or England, or Germany, but from Russia. It was 
conceivable that a French or an English or a German Jew 
should press his language upon Palestine as a culture-bearer. 
For the Russian Jew to do the same was unthinkable. In 
Russia the study of Hebrew for living purposes had been inher- 
ited from the illuminati, the Maskilim, of the early nineteenth 
century. The events of 1881-1882 and of 1891, and the rise of 
the Palestinian colonization projects, had only intensified love 
of the ancient holy language. The country school teachers 
would instinctively have taught Jewish children in Palestine 
in Hebrew, even if the New Settlement had not put Hebrew 
upon its banner. From the first it had revolted against the 
confusion of tongues in Jewish Palestine. Hebrew naturally 
was the only compromise acceptable to all the Jewish "na- 



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AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



tionals." And no indulgence was permitted. The parole was one 
language and only one pronunciation, the native Sefardic. For 
some it was more painful to sacrifice the off-color of the Hebrew 
vowels than to renounce the language they had spoken from 
their birth, though for the older people this too must have been 
far from easy. Many a social group adopted the rule of im- 
posing a fine upon its members when in the heat of discussion 
they slipped from Hebrew into German, Yiddish, French, or 
Russian. 

Hebrew was thus the only possibility in the public schools 
of Palestine. In the villages Arabic was inevitable, and so 
even in the colony schools two languages had to be taught ; all 
others were banished from the curriculum of the elementary 
school. Petah Tikwah alone of all the villages still clings to 
the French inherited from the Rothschild " administration." 
Where the village school develops from primary to secondary 
grades, a European language, French or German, is added, 
but it is distinctly put into the category of foreign languages. 

Once the language question is dismissed, only benefit ac- 
crued to Palestine from the presence of the Alliance, the Anglo- 
Jewish Association, and the Hilf sverein. The Alliance planted 
centers of light in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Safed, Tiberias, 
and Saida, providing everywhere except in Jaffa for girls as 
well as boys, and everywhere except in Saida in separate schools, 
and everywhere attaching manual training features to the 
classes, especially in the girls' schools. 

The Evelina de Rothschild School, only for girls, of whom it 
enrolls 650 at a time, teaching them handicrafts and training 
them for domestic work, has the distinction of having won the 
confidence and good-will of all the elements of the Ashkenazim, 
the Sefardim, and the other Orientals, with the exception 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 129 

only of the extremists that remain wholly unreconciled to 
secular education. 

The Hilfsverein with its veritable network of schools has a 
variety of educational achievements to its credit. None ex- 
ceeds in importance the establishment of Kindergartens, three 
in Jerusalem, three in Jaffa, and one each in Eehobot, Safed, 
Haifa, and Tiberias — an undertaking the value of which is 
enhanced by the exclusive use of Hebrew in all. The innova- 
tion was recognized as an indispensable adjunct to the Pales- 
tinian educational system. The Alliance and the Evelina de 
Eothschild followed suit. The devotion and heroism of the 
Kindergartners cannot be appreciated unless one pauses to 
take in the picture presented by a Palestinian Kindergarten : 
Yiddish and Spagniol-speaking toddlers, by the side of the 
Adj ami babies lisping their Persian, the G-rusinians with 
their Eussian, and Urfali, Maghrebi, Yemenite, and Aleppo 
tots with their various dialects of Arabic — this babel to be 
reduced to Sefardic Hebrew by a Eussian or German teacher ! 

In point of secondary education, the Hilfsverein supple- 
mented the Alliance, in Jerusalem with a girls' and a boys' 
school, the latter being the Lamel Foundation; with a boys' 
school in Jaffa ; and with a school for both sexes in Haifa and 
in the colony of Katra. 

That is not yet all. In addition to its primary and secondary 
schools, and its contributions to agricultural training in the 
colonies noted before, the Hilfsverein made admirable provi- 
sion for the higher education. It has a course for Kindergarten 
teachers ; a seminary for rabbis, calculated particularly for the 
Sefardic population ; and a teachers' seminary founded in 
1904. The candidates are expected to take a course in agri- 
culture to fit them for teaching in the village schools. The 



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AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



seminary has already supplied elementary teachers to some of 
the Hilfsverein schools, and attached to it is a commercial 
college with four classes. The language of instruction in all 
these higher institutions is German, though Hebrew is of course 
a prominent feature in the curriculum. These, all of them in 
Jerusalem, with evening extension or continuation classes for 
adults, form a remarkably complete system. In round numbers 
the Hilfsverein taught 3,000 pupils, and its force consisted 
of 150 teachers. 

The impetus to adopt Hebrew as the sole and only medium 
of instruction issuing from the village school, bore fruit in 
secondary and higher education, first in Jaffa and then in 
Jerusalem. Jaffa, the mother city of the Judean colonies, 
had indeed kept even pace with the colonies. In 1892 a boys' 
school, Bet ha-Sefer be-Jaffa, was founded, supported by the 
Odessa Committee and subventioned by the B'nai B'rith of 
America. It is now the school of the Alliance. The girls' 
school, Bet Sefer la-Banot, followed in 1893. In both schools 
Hebrew was the language. With the seminary for women 
teachers lately attached to it, the Bet Sefer la-Banot continues 
to be subsidized by the Odessa Committee, which is bound by a 
resolution, fathered by Ahad Ha- Am, to devote more than one- 
fourth of its revenues to education in Palestine. It has seven 
classes, and its 500 pupils, Ashkenazim, Sefardim, and Yeme- 
nites, are housed in a beautiful building, the gift of a Bussian- 
Jewish well-wisher from Irkutsk. It is fitted out with all the 
appointments of a modern school building, and set in a large 
tree-planted playground. 

Most important of all from the point of view of an eventual 
system of Hebrew education in Palestine was the founding, in 
1907, of the Theodor Herzl Hebrew Gymnasium, with seven 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 131 

classes, exclusive of the three preparatory classes. The curric- 
ulum is patterned after the German gymnasium, and the 
pupils graduated from it are prepared to enter a German, 
French, or Swiss university. As in all the other schools men- 
tioned there is a tuition fee, and the moderate revenue thus 
derived is supplemented by the Odessa Committee and by the 
contributions of Jews the world over, America, Europe, and 
South Africa. This gymnasium also has a worthy building for 
its more than seven hundred pupils, boys and girls, erected 
for it by a Jewish gentleman of Bradford, Eng. It stands at 
the head of Tel-Abib's main street, and the school is the pride 
and center of the Jaffa, indeed of the Palestine Jewish, com- 
munity. Together with the Bet Sefer la-Banot it attracts to 
Palestine hundreds who are debarred from an education by 
Russia's discriminatory legislation against the Jews. Russian 
Jewish mothers are said to form little societies, the members 
of which take turns at living in Jaffa and watching over all the 
children of their group. 

The religious element in the New Settlement represented by 
the Mizrahi in the Zionist movement, while indorsing the 
modern pedagogical methods of the two schools, and agreeing 
particularly with their use of Hebrew as the exclusive language 
of instruction, was not satisfied with their attitude towards 
religion, negative at best they maintain, according to some 
critics actually irreligious. This dissatisfaction brought about 
the establishing of the Tahkemoni, on the pattern of the 
German Realschule. Only six years in existence, it has already 
over two hundred boy pupils, and it is contemplating a build- 
ing worthy of Tel-Abib. For girls the Tahkemoni makes no 
provision. 



132 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



In Jerusalem a similar division occurred between the 
partisans of different attitudes towards religious teaching. In 
the year 1909-1910, two schools with Hebrew as the language 
of instruction were opened, the Heder Torah for those who 
desired a school complying at once with their religious stand- 
ards and with the generally accepted requirements of modern 
times, and the Hebrew Gymnasium, like that at Jaffa, for 
the element that takes the stand that the home not the school 
must determine the religious development of the child. The 
first has about seventy pupils, and is subventioned by the 
Hilfsverein, which has planned the curriculum; the second, 
supported with funds gathered largely in Galicia, has about 
one hundred and twenty-five pupils. 

One of the most important educational projects yet con- 
ceived for Palestine is the Jewish Institute for Technical 
Education in Haifa. The Wissotzky family of Eussia donated 
the first $100,000 towards such an institute; Mr. Jacob H. 
Schiff brought the project within the realm of the possible 
by a similar sum of $100,000 ; the Hilfsverein added a large 
gift from its Cohn-Oppenheim Foundation; the National 
Fund gave the land, to the value of $20,000, for the building 
as a perpetual leasehold ; and larger and smaller subscriptions 
and scholarship funds were collected, particularly in America. 
The managing board was composed of representatives of all 
these various interests, and the leading officers were identical 
with those of the Hilfsverein. When the building was all but 
ready, in 1913, an unfortunate difference of opinion arose as 
to the language of instruction. The Zionists withdrew from 
the management, and when peace was restored, further com- 
plications, into which it is unnecessary to enter here, led, in 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 133 

March, 1915, to the forced sale of the school building, which 
was bought in by the Hilfsverein for the sum of $56,250. 

During the controversy feeling ran high in Palestine. The 
younger generation looked upon the conflict as of decisive im- 
portance. Their Hebrew mother tongue was contemned, they 
felt. Destruction menaced the world of resuscitated Hebrew 
ideals for which their pioneer fathers had struggled. The 
pedagogic objection, that a scientific nomenclature had not 
been sufficiently developed in Hebrew for it to serve as the 
medium of instruction in a technological school, was answered 
simply by pointing to the Jaffa Gymnasium. The opponents 
of the Hilfsverein plan in Palestine withdrew their children 
from all the schools of the German society, and established a 
parallel series of eight schools: a Teachers' Seminary and 
Commercial School, a boys' and a girls' school in Jerusalem, 
courses for Kindergarten teachers, together with Kindergar- 
tens, a night school in Jerusalem, a boys' school in Jaffa, and 
a boys' school in Haifa ; and in some of the colonies self -taxa- 
tion has replaced the Hilfsverein subsidy. The Zionist 
Organization has assumed the budget of nearly $31,000 for 
these schools, though such activity does not lie directly in its 
scope. 

The deplorable results are patent : a duplication of effort and 
expenditure in a cause in which forces and funds are small 
enough ; the loss of unity in effort in a country sufficiently dis- 
tracted by division; and the delay in opening an institution 
from which Jew and Arab alike had expected great things. 
Harbors are waiting to be built ; bridges and roads are needed ; 
railroad expansion has hitherto depended wholly on imported 
brains and skill; irrigation plants must be multiplied; and 



134 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



J ewish students denied by Kussian autocracy their right to an 
education have lost a cherished hope. 

The last word in the controversy, one cannot help but think, 
will not be spoken in Berlin, or in New York, or in Moscow, 
but in Jerusalem, and there not by this generation or by 
leaders, but rather by the processions of school children, on 
whose breath the world depends, as they wend their way singing 
to Moza on Hamishah Oser be-Shebat, the Palestinian chil- 
dren's Arbor Day, or when they frolic on Lag be-Omer on the 
heights encircling Jerusalem, or when, as members of the 
widespread Makkabi athletic societies, they respond to the 
calls made upon them on all public occasions. 

The subject of the higher education has not yet been ex- 
hausted. At least passing reference must be made to the nine 
Yeshibot of Jerusalem, with their 800 students, institutions 
and students both supported at a cost of about $60,000 
annually. These Yeshibot are partly Hebrew seminaries, 
partly Hebrew research institutions, the latter in the sense 
that the students are scholars that devote their life to the 
cultivation of Hebrew lore. 

One of the most valuable undertakings, originated and 
fostered by the Odessa Committee, is the Teachers' Union, 
formed by the conference of teachers held in connection with 
the Kenessiah of 1903 in Zichron Jacob. The association has 
manifold objects, all tending to develop a unified standard of 
Hebrew education in Palestine, to which the schools will 
gradually conform and so constitute a completely graded 
system. When once the olive plantations of the National Fund 
are full-grown and yield a revenue, which according to its 
statutes is to be devoted to the completion of the system of 
education, the preliminary activities of the Teachers' Union 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 135 



will be recognized as fundamental. It has drawn up curri- 
culums for schools, and has stimulated the production of 
Hebrew text-books, which are issued by its publication society 
Kohelet. Among its notable achievements are the founding 
of vacation courses for teachers and the holding of lectures 
and evening classes for adults. It has stated conferences, and 
issues two magazines, Ha-Hinnuk, a pedagogic bi-monthly, 
and Ha-Moledet, for children, both, needless to say, in Hebrew. 
The language — developing it for pedagogic and daily uses, 
and awakening love for it among the people — is one of its 
main purposes, as it is the only purpose of the Waad ha-Lashon, 
the " Hebrew Academy," which is watching the coining of 
words and the growth of the language in the new literature 
and on the street. 

Of the libraries in the villages mention has been made. The 
central library of the whole country is at J erusalem, Midrash 
Abrabanel it is called, founded by the B'nai B'rith lodge of 
Jerusalem, and enlarged in 1892, by the library of Joseph 
Chasanowitz of Bielistock, in honor of whom " Ginze Joseph " 
has been added to the name of the institution. Every effort 
has been put forth to make it a central library for the whole 
Jewish world, by having Jewish authors deposit a copy of their 
works in it as they appear — a sort of supplemental copyright 
duty. The object has not yet been attained. It has only 
about 35,000 books, over half of them Hebrew. The biblio- 
graphical treasures of Palestine are stored not in this library, 
but in the Yeshibot of J erusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and Saf ed, 
and in the private library of Mussayev, a Bokhara Jew, a 
devotee of the Cabala. His library consists of rare printed 
books and manuscripts, and with them are exhibited his art 



136 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



treasures, for he is an art connoisseur besides being a student 
of the Zohar and a bibliophile. 

In Jaffa is the Shaare Zion library with 6000 volumes, 
established by the Odessa Committee, which is the patron of 
libraries in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Tiberias besides. It is 
resorted to by the Jews of the colonies in the vicinity as well 
as by Jaffa Jews, and it is housed by the Jewish club. The 
Workingmen's Clubs in Jerusalem and Jaffa also have collec- 
tions of books, and the Jerusalem Bet ha- Am has 4300. The 
last institution is the gathering-place for the young people, 
who are attracted to its newspaper and game room, and who 
go to it for their society meetings and their social gatherings. 
In all the urban centers there are mutual aid societies that 
have a semi-social character. Clubs are beginning to spring 
up, and the B'nai B'rith has lodges in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, 
Safed, and Zichron Jacob. 

Other recent institutions are the two music schools, one at 
Jaffa and one at Jerusalem, the pupils of which occasionally 
give concerts. A collection of songs, many of them of recent 
Palestinian origin, has been issued, and as many of the schools 
have their athletic Makkabi brigades, so many of them have 
their school orchestras and glee clubs. 

The press with only two exceptions is in Hebrew. The ex- 
ceptions are a Spagniol paper, El Liberal, and one in Yiddish, 
Ha-Pardess. There are two dailies: Ha-Or and Ha-Herut; 
Ha-Moriah, in the interests of orthodox Judaism, appeared 
three times weekly (it ceased publication a short while ago) ; 
there is also a weekly, Ha-Ahdut, a workingmen's paper; the 
semi-monthly Ha-Poel ha-Zair, originally the organ of the 
Workmen's Union, but latterly representing the New Set- 
tlement in general; Ha-Meassef, a monthly; the children's 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 13 7 



monthly Ha-Moledet, and the bi-monthly Ha-Hinnuk, the 
pedagogic organ of the Teachers' Union; Ha-Me'ir, a literary 
and scientific quarterly; Ha-Faklai, an agricultural periodi- 
cal, the organ of the Union of the Judean Colonies ; and J eru- 
salem, the useful annual issued by Abraham Moses Luncz, the 
scholar and devoted communal worker, who, himself blind, 
has been eyes to many afflicted like himself and by his re- 
searches a guide through Jewish Jerusalem and Jewish Pales- 
tine. 

Of publication societies Kohelet has been mentioned. There - 
are others: Yefet for literary productions, and Le-Am foT 
popular scientific brochures, of which it has issued some 
seventy — all of which goes far toward explaining why there 
should be thirteen printers 5 establishments in Jerusalem alone. 

Among the brochures issued by Le-Am is one on the diseases 
prevalent in Palestine. Two of the most widespread and com- 
mon, malaria and trachoma, are both preventable and curable, 
provided they are not merely treated with a view to relieving 
individual patients, but are also investigated as to the funda- 
mental causes, and measures are taken to remove the causes. 
In the open country the marshy stretches with their colonies 
of mosquitoes and in the cities the defective cisterns also offer- 
ing a shelter to the insect pest, are sufficient to explain the 
malaria scourge. 

The first effective step towards an intelligent campaign 
against malaria was taken in 1912 by the establishment of a 
Health Bureau in Jerusalem by Mr. Nathan Straus, equipped 
to meet many of the existing sanitary needs. The Turkish 
Government realized the value of the institution for the coun- 
try at large. When, during the first Balkan War, there was 
an outbreak of cholera in Tiberias, the director of the Health 



138 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



Bureau was requested to hasten thither, and his services in 
stamping out the epidemic in short order were recognized by 
the Government. Again, during the present war, the Govern- 
ment turned to the Health Bureau for scientific co-operation. 
All the analyses required in the Palestinian army hospitals 
have been made by it; it has had to furnish the typhus vaccine, 
and hold itself in readiness to combat epidemics as they made 
their appearance. At the same time its trachoma and malaria 
work for the civil population has proceeded, hampered though 
it, like all medical agencies, was by the shortage in medical 
supplies. Mr. Straus's Institute associated with itself the 
Society of Jewish Physicians and Scientists for Improving 
Sanitary Conditions in Palestine, and both co-operated with 
the German Society for Combating Malaria in Jerusalem. 
Up to the outbreak of the war the three agencies together 
constituted the International Health Institute. There are four 
departments of work in the Straus Bureau : the hygienic divi- 
sion, with a special branch for the treatment of diseases of the 
eye, a bacteriological and a serological division, and a hydro- 
phobia division. Formerly the victims of rabies had to be 
hurried to Cairo or Constantinople. The Bureau has issued 
two reports, one on malaria in Jerusalem and one on the 
infectious eye diseases in Palestine. 

Since the same year, 1912, there exists in Palestine also a 
Jewish Medical Society, which holds conferences at stated 
times, and issues its Transactions quarterly in Hebrew. These 
two medical agencies will doubtless succeed in making Pales- 
tine lovers pay serious attention to the sanitary needs of the 
country. It has long been known that a large percentage of 
Jerusalem's ills are due to the lack of an adequate water supply 
and the dependence on defective cisterns. Elsewhere in Pales- 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 13 9 



tine, in Jaffa and in the villages, the question of water is given 
the first place ; in Jerusalem alone public opinion has not been 
aroused. It has moreover been demonstrated that it would 
require no great engineering ingenuity and not excessive means 
to draw water into Jerusalem from the springs and pools 
near-by. A year ago it was announced that the concession for 
this great improvement together with the lighting of the city 
and electric transportation facilities had been awarded by the 
Government to a French syndicate. The report was greeted 
with joy, for the undertaking would mean health and real 
prosperity for the Holy City, so beloved and yet so stricken. 

A LAND OF POSSIBILITIES 

Date of Forecast — Misconceptions — National Groups in Ottoman 
Empire — The Red Ticket— Fertility of Land — Methods of 
Cultivation — Mineral Products — Industrial Possibilities — 
Markets and Shipping Facilities — Imports and Exports — Rise 
in Land Prices — Railroad Expansion. 

The foregoing presentation has insulated the new Jewish 
work in Palestine from its background and environment, as 
though it were wholly independent of and unconnected with 
them. It is hardly necessary to assert that the setting is of first 
importance. It amounts to a truism to say that however 
strenuous the efforts of the Jewish world to open up Palestine 
to home-hunting Israel, they will be unavailing in the end 
unless the desire and will of the Jewish people are endorsed by 
general conditions. 

Before the possibilities of Palestine as a land of Jewish im- 
migration are set forth, there must be clearness on one point. 
As the specific description of the New Jewish Palestine here 
given should be taken as dated a year ago, before the outbreak 
of the war, so the general statements now to be made will be 



140 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



based on what was then, not on what the fortunes of war will 
bring forth, or, without our cognizance, have already brought 
forth. This chapter purports to be not prophecy or political 
speculation, but a forecast on the basis of nature's and man's 
work in the Near East. 

There are current phrases and statements that have created 
an atmosphere of haziness and misconception on the subject 
of Palestine. The catchword about the " immobility of the 
East " is re-inforced by the familiar Jewish expression, " going 
bach to the land of the fathers." They impart a reactionary 
flavor to the immigration movement toward Palestine. The 
casual tourist has long been spreading reports about the 
sterility of the land, and misapprehensions prevail as to the 
character of Turkish rule. 

To begin with the last: Eeference has been made to the 
autonomy granted by the Ottoman system to national and 
religious groups. In the Orient the two terms are all but 
synonymous. By a sort of home-rule system freedom is en- 
joyed by all such groups to order their internal affairs as 
their traditions dictate. They administer them as independent 
bodies. In all that appertains to the complex fiscal adminis- 
tration they are of course held as strictly to account as are 
citizens and residents in other countries. With especial refer- 
ence to the agrarian law, which, based in part on old feudal 
relations, is peculiarly involved; and likewise with reference 
to the system of imposts, which is to a very large extent a 
system of agricultural taxes, the Ottoman code, since the adop- 
tion of the Constitution in 1908, has been undergoing changes 
that are calculated to bring it into line with the requirements 
of a developing country. 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 141 



In one respect Jews labor under a special disability. Ad- 
mission to Turkey depends upon the presentation of a passport 
viseed by the Turkish consul of the traveler's home-land. 
Until five years ago the passport thus viseed had to be 
deposited at the port of entry, and for inland use a Turkish 
document was issued instead. This rule has been abolished 
for all but Jews coming to Palestine. Since 1888, on their 
arrival they are handed the "Ked Ticket," good for only 
three months and marking them as Jews from foreign coun- 
tries. This is in direct contradiction to Turkey's uniform 
treatment of her resident native or naturalized Jews, which 
places them on an absolute parity with her other nationalities. 
Though the regulation in respect to the time limit is more 
honored in the breach than the observance, at intervals it 
has been enforced with punctilious severity. In any case, it 
is a stigma that should be removed. And it can be removed 
by the Jews of Palestine themselves as soon as they become 
naturalized Ottoman subjects in sufficiently large numbers to 
influence the course of events, not only in regard to this par- 
ticular, but in the many ways for which the Constitution of 
1908 has leveled the path. Hitherto Ottomanization has not 
appeared urgent, on account of the Capitulations and other 
means of obtaining the rights of extra-territoriality, under 
which Turkey granted a large measure of jurisdiction to 
foreign consuls. " Nationals 99 registered with their consuls, 
to whom they resorted in case of legal or political difficulties. 
Since the system of Capitulations has been abrogated, it is 
obvious that Ottoman citizenship has assumed a new dignity 
and a new importance for the Jew in Palestine. The way is 
open for him to become a civic force in village, town, province, 
and state. 



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AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



So far as Palestine is concerned, the land cannot be held 
responsible for the prevailing poverty. The experts say that, 
barring size, it has the conditions and therefore the opportun- 
ities of California. Small as it is, it has varieties of climate 
and soil rivaling large areas elsewhere. Its surface is much 
diversified, from the alluvial plain at the sea-shore to the soft 
lava formation of the hill-country. The soils in various parts 
are adapted for all sorts of crops — for cereals, for truck farm- 
ing, and for plantations. Some of the products have been 
mentioned incidentally. There are many others that might be 
enumerated: melons are abundant and delicious; figs, dates, 
and pomegranates thrive now and have a greater future ; honey 
is produced in comparatively small quantities, but the yield 
can easily be increased; and tobacco has not been sufficiently 
studied in relation to Palestine. Wheat yields four and five- 
fold in the least propitious regions, eight to tenfold in Galilee, 
and fifty and sixtyfold in the Hauran beyond the Jordan. 
Vegetables are endless in variety and unexcelled in succulence. 

Over against these advantages should be set the lack of 
copious watercourses in some parts of the country — but only 
in some parts. The environs of Hebron, for example, are rich 
in springs, and Transjordania in streams. At worst irrigation 
works must be resorted to ; in many neighborhoods an intelli- 
gent study of conditions will probably discover a remedy in the 
application of the findings of modern science and practice. 
The American dry-farming system and American implements, 
it has already been demonstrated, will solve problems in some 
sections. Fertilizers, cattle-raising with the animal humus 
thus produced, and long-term rotation of certain crops, promise 
results, and so does the restoration of the ancient terracing of 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 143 



the hillsides, which may yet furnish indirect proof that even 
Arabic vines can be made to produce a marketable crop. 

After a long period of coupled neglect and abuse, it is neces- 
sary to call help of every sort into requisition, especially in a 
country in which it is admitted that all conditions demand the 
intensive farming that latter-day theory makes almost coequal 
with the economic progress of humanity, and that raises farm- 
ing to an occupation demanding trained intelligence in the 
same degree as it demands physical endurance. 

Though Palestine is not rich in mineral products, the bowels 
of the earth await exploitation no less than its surface. 
Asphalt, bitumen, salt, phosphate, bromine and iodine salts, 
sulphur, and petroleum are to be found, if in small quantities, 
in particularly good quality. The Standard Oil Company is 
said to be preparing to explore for oil in the Dead Sea region. 
Building materials exist, though not in sufficiently large 
amounts to offset the dearth of wood, pending the success of 
the reafforestation work already well under way. There is 
coal, but so little that in discussing industrial expansion wise 
heads are planning for products that require low degrees of 
heat application, as, for instance, the cement building material 
made by means of high mechanical pressure. Others are 
thinking of the possibility of harnessing the climate and 
developing sun-motors of intenser power than those known 
hitherto. The large beds of lime and gypsum suggest export- 
ing possibilities, and the earth is full of pottery material, 
which has been utilized hitherto only in primitive ways. The 
presence of alkalis has led to the manufacture of soaps, which 
rank second in the list of exports, as the indigenous sumach 
and valonea account for the existence of tanneries now as of 
old. 



144 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



For the development of industries there is sufficient raw 
material: The manufacture of oils from sesame, olives, 
oranges, and aromatic and medicinal plants is in its infancy ; 
hardly any of the by-products have yet been considered. Be- 
sides cognacs from grapes, spirits from cereals suggest them- 
selves, as well as non-alcoholic drinks from grapes. Wheat is 
already being used for maccaroni. The canning of fruits and 
vegetables and the preserving and conserving industries have 
not yet received serious consideration, in spite of the endless 
opportunities that exist and the admonition given by Califor- 
nia's success. Silk culture was tried in Eosh Pinnah, and 
abandoned in 1906, but, if one notes the results achieved in 
the Lebanon district, as evidenced by the export records of 
Beirut, one cannot believe that the reasons will remain con- 
clusive forever. Glass was once made at Tantura, Baron de 
Bothschild's factory near Athlit; that, too, with the sand of 
the dunes at hand, remains a fair hope in spite of the failure 
of the first attempt. Sugar production ought to be possible 
on a large scale in a land that can grow both beets and cane. 
With herds of fat-tailed sheep "upon a thousand hills," 
woolen products are not impossible along with the exporting 
of the raw material already done on a modest scale. Bezalel 
will develop carpet-weaving, and its copper and brass and 
silver products even now compete in exporting value with the 
mother-of-pearl articles of Bethlehem. There are a number 
of machine shops in Jaffa and Haifa. They will multiply 
with the plantations needing motors and irrigation works, 
demonstrating that there are openings for industries for which 
the raw materials must be imported, and such openings will 
increase with the modernizing of the Turkish system of 
imposts now under way. 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 145 



A large part of this outlined development naturally depends 
upon the growth of the population, as the growth of the popula- 
tion depends in turn upon the industrial expansion. But even 
at the present stage, much could be disposed of if it were pro- 
duced. Eight at the door of Palestine lies Egypt, which, some- 
one has said, has its mouth wide open constantly that its 
hungry, capacious maw may be filled. Its native population as 
well as its visitors want much more than they get, and with 
proper regulation Palestine could supply vegetables, dairv 
products, poultry, and fruit, if nothing else, as it already sup- 
plies wines in considerable quantity. If markets at a distance ' " 
are considered, shipping facilities in a region so near the Suez 
Canal are adequate. They have been growing steadily: At 
the port of Jaffa, from 1903 to 1910, the increase has been 
from 425 steamers, with a tonnage of 803,000, to 707 with a 
tonnage of 1,115,000; and from 340 sailing vessels, with a 
tonnage of 12,000, to 756 with a tonnage of 24,000. Haifa has 
a similar encouraging record, and Gaza has within a few years 
attained importance as a barley shipping place. Such progress 
has been achieved, though not one of the ports on the Syrian 
coast has a harbor. What may be expected of the Near East 
when the Haifa Institute sends forth engineers and builders ? 

The trade balances complement the story told by the ship- 
ping. In September 1912, the American consul at Jerusalem 
reported that there had been an increase of 200$ in the value of 
Palestine exports and imports since 1900, and of 100$ since 
1905. The Anglo-Palestine Bank's figures corroborate his 
statement at least for the port of Jaffa, through which passes, 
it is said, 40$ of the Palestine trade. Prom the Jewish point 
of view, on account of the proximity of the large colonies of 
J udea, Jaffa is most important, but when all the railroad con- 



146 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



nections now contemplated are finished, Haifa may begin to 
dispute the supremacy of the southern port. The table of the 
Anglo-Palestine Bank is quoted by Nawratzki as follows : 



Value of Value of 

Year Imports Exports 

1903 $2,200,000 $1,620,000 

1904 2,360,000 1,480,000 

1905 2,300,000 1,840,000 

1906 3,300,000 2,500,000 

1907 4,040,000 2,420,000 

1908 4,020,000 2,780,000 

1909 4,860,000 2,800,000 

1910 5,020,000 3,180,000 

1911 5,820,000 3,840,000 



The specific figures for exports given by the American consul 
for 1910, 1911, 1912, and 1913 deserve attention. In studying 
them, the reader should not fail to take into consideration that 
1912 and 1913 were the years of the Balkan Wars : 



Articles 


1910 


1911 


1912 


191S 


Almonds 


$3,908 


$6,667 


$27,739 


$43,798 


Animals, live 


26,200 


24,819 


21,849 


25,350 


Barley 






6,083 
1,723 
2,725 


16,546 
1,897 
2,788 


Beans 


9,264 
5,594 




Bones 


7,154 




16,733 


31,754 


35,039 


11,636 




55,106 


57,911 


98,547 


46,231 


Fodder 


9,722 


5,013 


3,407 


4,231 


Fruits 


179,726 


204,393 


121,662 


165,461 


Hides 


79,945 


83,460 


36,012 


51,244 


Oil, olive, and sesame. 


32,260 


72,900 


19,466 


30,512 


Oranges 


1,136,794 


1,058,464 


1,380,139 


1,449,757 




36,187 


42,217 


53,960 


50,806 




179,659 


476,917 


146,774 


152,321 


Soap 


762,538 


702,236 


868,500 


973,300 


Souvenirs, religious . . 


58,889 


93,193 


107,063 


101,223 


Vegetables, lupines .... 


64,935 


64,140 


51,682 


61,123 




293,963 


277,641 


337,735 


294,569 


Wool 


35,465 


32,849 


22,289 


13,029 


All other articles 


82,942 


216,699 


72,997 


145,995 



Totals $3,0.69,830 $3,458,427 $3,415,391 $3,641,817 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE ]4? 



And here are the tables of imports for the same years : 



Articles 


1910 


1911 


1912 


1913 




$27,bb2 


<p o*i on n 


dM A TAi? 

<t>10,70b 


»1 T OCA 

$17,8b0 




~i AT COT 

107,597 


~i (\rr rr O A 

197,580 


-» t rr 1 (\a 
175,194 


ioj n ot 
184,92 I 




439, bOb 


rnn lift 

59 <,119 


999 K09 


< DO, UlO 




28,081 


40,538 


39,419 


OO OAO 

38,202 


Chemicals & fertilizer. . 




■ ■ ■ ■ * 


71,440 


rri a ot 
51,49 < 




O A 1 AT 

24,197 


57,084 


T A AAA 

70,000 


no nn /< 
98,994 




■i A A OOA 

104,220 


107,355 


145,995 


252,571 




in Oil1 

4Z,841 


A 9 TOO 

4o, 1 99 








16,680 


•1 -1 r7 A O O 

117,088 


inn rr Q ~t 

172,7bl 


159,621 


Pish, salt and dried .... 


on enn 


nn TOO 

Z9, < 8o 


4b, i lo 


,b91 


Glassware and pottery 1 . . 


83,907 


67,158 


61,318 


64,481 


Hides and leather 


79,709 


96,065 


71,538 


76,890 


Iron and steel, manu- 










factures of: 














15,573 


8,662 


15,816 




-1 A C A O O 

105,938 


122,b3b 


177,627 


156,701 


Iron bars, girders, etc. 


on aoc 

82,435 


110 A AO 

112,903 


AT OOA 

97,330 


1 1 T TO A 

117,730 




114,642 


100 nfto 

138,208 


72,997 


92,463 




86,734 


71,294 


AT OOA 

97,330 


HA CCA 

74,554 


Oil : 

Illuminating 


34,185 


35,915 


68,131 


62,047 


212,411 


207,94b 


173,534 


394,18b 


Linseed and machine. 


41,133 


OO TOT 

38,737 


AO OCC 

48,bb5 


cro troi 
53,531 




-I -t c o rr rr 

lib, 355 


1 cr /i /< c o 
154,4bo 


i ca onrr 
154,995 


OQT A OC 

2o 1 ,485 




32,019 


OA OCT 

30,3b7 


on i nn 
29,199 


y< O CCC 

48,bb5 


Paper and stationery... 


OC AC A 

SO, 454 


mo AAO 

10Z,00Z 


oa ncc 


A O TOO 

16, 1 98 




-1 rr rr r o 

17,053 


OO OOO 

22,288 


OO DOC 

23,395 


21,412 




92,857 


105, 3b0 


145,995 


161,567 




O Cf O OOP 

253,385 


296,175 


a n r* aaa 

226,000 


oao /'On 

308,682 




48,597 


59,663 


64,238 


65,834 




7,792 


24,965 


39,419 


35,282 




50,783 


67,644 


58,398 


61,804 




364,553 


315,544 


202,446 


260,844 


Textiles : 










Cotton goods 


1,179,954 


1,276,678 


1,182,949 


1,171,853 


Other 


61,181 


69,104 


72,365 


72,997 




43,275 


34,747 


24,332 


37,958 


Tobacco and snuff 


323,275 


351,361 


243,325 


327,515 




53,345 


76,404 


93,500 


52,071 


Wood, manufactures of: 












65,185 


35,525 


48,665 


47,789 


Lumber 


222,307 


391,267 


486,650 


520,715 




188,561 


161,130 


316,323 


218,992 



Totals 



$4,863,018 $5,693,367 $5,288,127 $6,388,041 



148 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



The above figures represent the dealings of Palestine with 
Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Egypt, 
France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Eoumania, Eussia, 
Turkey, the British Isles and Colonies, and the United States. 

In another way the progress of Palestine is recorded in the 
rise of land values : in Petah Tikwah land that cost from $2 
to $5 a dunam (a little less than a quarter of an acre) at the 
beginning of J ewish colonization enterprises, now brings from 
$12 to $40. Twenty-two years ago a parcel of land in Rehobot 
was bought for $800, and left unimproved. Two-thirds of it 
was recently sold for $2400, and for the other third the owner 
had an offer of $1600. In Tel-Abib land values rose four and 
fivefold in three years. 

That the whole world has confidence in the expansibility of 
the Near East is shown by the network of railroads that has 
covered the region since 1892, when the Jaffa-Jerusalem Eoad 
was opened to traffic. Three years later Beirut was connected 
with Damascus, and after another ten years, in 1905, a short 
line was run from Haifa to the interior, at Beisan. Since then 
the last has been extended to the southern end of the Sea of Ti- 
berias and thence to a junction with the Hedjas Road, which 
when completed, as it has already been for a long stretch, will 
follow the old pilgrim route from Damascus all the way down 
to Mecca. The Hedjas Road in turn is an offshoot from the 
Anatolian-Bagdad system binding Constantinople to the dis- 
tant Mesopotamian city and sooner or later to the Persian 
Gulf. From Haifa's first junction at Beisan, close to Mer- 
hawiah, a branch is being built to Nablus and Jerusalem, so 
completing the circuit to the southern port, Jaffa, and from 
Jaffa, it is expected, travelers and freight will soon be trans- 
ported to Port Said and Cairo by land. So, not only will 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 149 



Palestine have its hinterland, eventually with connections all 
the way to India, brought close to it, but with an arm flung 
out northwestward Jerusalem will touch the great Atlantic 
coast cities in Western Europe, and southwestward the Cape- 
to- Cairo Eoad will bring it into communication with the 
extreme point of the African Continent. Palestine lying at 
the junction of the three continents of the Eastern hemisphere 
gathers all these bands of civilization into its bosom, and 
becomes again the great highway, not as once for armies of 
destruction, but for the forces of prosperous peace. 

CONCLUSION 

PALESTINE AND THE UNITED STATES 

An Eastern Land of Jewish. Immigration — Organization of Jewry 
Outside — War Relief Measures — Organization of Palestine 
Jewry. 

In J ewish vision Palestine has always lain thus at the heart 
of the inhabited world. Therefore, even in the face of a uni- 
versal war's brutal menace to international safeguards, its cen- 
tral, coveted position arouses in the "lovers of Zion" not 
apprehension of disaster, but rather a sense of exultation as to 
future achievement. Its memories, tasks, and opportunities, 
equally noble, challenged J ewish ability, and the gauntlet was 
taken up. Jewish penetration comprehended the trend of cir- 
cumstances in the Near East, and Jewish pluck has in large 
measure liberated the resources of Palestine. 

The crisis evoked by the war has thrown the subject of the 
Jew in Palestine in sharp relief upon the canvas of Jewish life. 
In minds and hearts stirred by the suffering in strife-torn 
Europe, the question rises to the surface : Are the leaders of the 
Palestine movement prepared to assert that the Eastern land 



150 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



is ready for a mass immigration from comparatively near-by 
Russia, Roumania, and Galicia? 

No categoric answer can be given. Palestine is not yet a 
land for immigrants in the same sense as the United States with 
its boundless spaces, its unlimited possibilities, its developed 
opportunities — with a place ready for every stalwart new- 
comer to slip into. Whether it will soon become a land of 
Eastern Jewish immigration as the United States is the land 
of Western Jewish immigration, will depend upon the attitude 
of the Jewish world towards the subject. Palestine Jewish 
immigration will long require the thoroughly organized and 
unified assistance of the well-established, non-migratory Jews 
everywhere. But if outside Jewry for a time, and during 
that time ungrudgingly, will make of itself the exchequer of 
Palestine Jewry, the future of a considerable part of the Jewish 
race will indubitably lie in the expanding East. 

Is there evidence that this is coming to pass? Is Jewry 
tending to unify itself for practical operations in Palestine as 
it has for two thousand years been all but a unit in point of 
Holy Land sentiment? On these questions the world war 
has thrown light. The Halukkah has indeed been almost en- 
tirely cut off in the lands in which the sword was unsheathed. 
It was to have been expected : the Halukkah is the tribute of the 
poorest of the poor nearly everywhere. That faith and interest 
in the cause were not paralyzed even by the bloodiest of catas- 
trophes, was proved by the more prosperous among the Pales- 
tine lovers. From the German trenches in France, from 
England and her colonies, and from the battle line in Eussia 
and Austria, the pennies still flow into the coffers of the 
National Fund, if not so copiously as in good times, yet with 
unabated confidence in the. practical worth of the land that 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 151 



typifies to the mind and heart of the Jew the principles for 
which his people has stood always, and has suffered often, 
during its long history. 

But the most striking testimony to the newer appreciation 
of the claims as well as the value of Palestine as a land of 
refuge has been afforded by America. In the course of this 
article there has repeatedly been occasion to refer to America's 
effective participation in Palestinian development. From the 
eighteenth century down to yesterday, the Jewish immigrant, 
too frequently forced by business and industrial pressure to 
deny in practice the claims of Jewish tradition which in theory 
he may yet avow as legitimate and desirable, nevertheless did 
not " forget Jerusalem." If at times the age-long devotion was 
pushed out of earshot, its voice made itself heard to good pur- 
pose at crucial moments. Over and above the tribute levied, 
with the help of an imperious custom, by the Meshullah 
Karigal and his uncounted successors, America has enriched 
Palestinian life with contributions that rise beyond the level 
of the ordinary. From Judah Touro down to the Zionist plan 
for an Emma Lazarus Garden City for Yemenites, it has had a 
realizing sense of the housing needs of a growing population. 
The influence exercised more or less indirectly, through the 
Waad ha-Kelali, by the North American Eelief Society for the 
Indigent Jews of Palestine and the New York Society for the 
Eelief of the Poor in Palestine, became a conscious aim in 
the attempts to systematize the Palestine collections during the 
last five years made by the Waad ha-Merkazi of New York and 
the Palestine Committee of the National Conference of Jewish 
Charities in the United States, the latter called into being at 
the instance of the Central Conference of American Eabbis. 
The same period of five years has seen a constantly increasing 



152 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



interest in Palestinian undertakings of large educational and 
social scope — agricultural development (the Jewish Agricul- 
tural Experiment Station), sanitation (the Straus Health 
Bureau), higher education (the Jaffa Gymnasium and the 
Haifa Technical Institute), philanthropy (the District Nurses 
System), and economic progress (Ha-Ahuzah) . 

The last group of interests implies a recognition of the 
change wrought in Palestine by the Zionist attitude and Zion- 
ist activities : the emergence of the Holy Land from the field 
of charity that was suffused with a lovable sentiment, upon the 
field of economic opportunity fortified by the same sentiment. 
The same recognition, raised to a higher power, is conveyed 
by the action called forth by the war. Hardly was it realized, 
at the outbreak of hostilities, that Palestine was isolated from 
Europe, whence came nine-tenths of its support, than energetic 
steps looking to its relief were taken in the United States. 
Without a moment's delay, the American Jewish Committee 
heeded Ambassador Morgenthau's warning that a generation's 
work was menaced with extinction, and no sooner formed, the 
American Jewish Eelief Committee followed its example, both 
bodies supplementing the efforts of the Zionist Organization. 
The activities of the last agency illustrate best of all how 
vividly the Jews of America realize the value of what has been 
fashioned by Jewish hands in Palestine, and what its preserva- 
tion may mean in the rebuilding of the J ewish world, which, 
if an appraisement may be made before the smoke of battle 
has cleared away, is suffering a third destruction of its sanc- 
tuaries compared with which the two others as well as the 
1492 exile from Spain and the 1882 pogroms in Russia are 
insignificant in extent. At the beginning of the war it was 
apprehended that the International Zionist Organization with 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 153 



its seat in Berlin would be paralyzed. A provisional adminis- 
tration was spontaneously instituted in the United States. 
When, later, it appeared that the regularly elected Executive 
Committee had not been disrupted, the provisional body 
assumed guardianship of Jewish Palestinian interests. That 
the American Zionists instinctively felt confidence in American 
sympathy with Palestine endeavors corroborates what has been 
asserted about the appreciation of Palestinian values by 
American Jewry. The results of its appeal are none the less 
instructive. Xot only did it collect an Emergency Fund to 
replace the sums usually raised in Europe as well as in 
America for the maintenance of the Palestinian schools and 
the Zionist enterprises in the colonies and the cities, but its 
office became the clearing house for all concerned about the 
fate of Palestine. Figures tell the story : Through the instru- 
mentality of the American Jewish Committee and the Ameri- 
can Jewish Eelief Committee, $7 5.000 were sent to Jaffa, to 
the manager of the Palestine Office, the head of the disbursing 
committee designated by the Ambassador. In addition there 
passed through the hands of the Provisional Executive Com- 
mittee for General Zionist Affairs, up to May 31, 1915, the 
sum of $335,359/29, of which, in round numbers, $79,000 
was disbursed for the normal Zionist activities in Palestine; 
$61,000. an undesignated relief fund, was distributed among 
institutions and associations in proportion to their scope and 
needs ; and $167,000 was transmitted to institutions and indi- 
viduals named by the donors. Finally, the American Jewish 
Eelief Committee and the Zionist Executive together secured, 
at a cost of $81,627.81, the food supplies which, by the courtesy 
of the United States Government, were carried to the Holy 



154 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



Land in the Collier Vulcan, and distributed among Jews, 
Moslems, and Christians. 

Because it typifies at once the value attached to the new life 
in Palestine and the method of relief mainly resorted to, one 
more act of American initiative and generosity should be re- 
corded : the raising of a considerable part of a loan of $120,000 
to tide the Palestinian orange-growers over the disastrous year 
in which the whole crop of a million and a half boxes of fruit 
rotted under their trees. Without the loan not only a year's 
harvest, but the orange-groves themselves, the product of a 
quarter of a century's labor and care, would have perished. 

A part of the other funds transmitted to Palestine was like- 
wise applied to loans to planters, business men, and artisans, 
and for the execution of public works in which labor could be 
employed. Though America did not succeed in feeding all the 
hungry, it is a solace to know, as has been reported, that not a 
single Jewish workingman in the colonies has been without 
employment during the long period of stress. This may be due 
to some extent to the enlistment of the Arab workingmen in 
the Turkish army, but largely it is attributable to the moneys 
from America and their wise application. 

A large part of the credit for what has been accomplished 
belongs to Ambassador Morgenthau and his personal repre- 
sentative in Palestine, who planned the distribution of the 
first $50,000 on the spot. Again, a large part of the success 
achieved is due to the intervention and help of the United 
States Government, without which it might have been found 
impossible to transmit to their destination the moneys col- 
lected and advanced. And mention should be made of the 
friendly spirit displayed by the Turkish Government, which 
granted facilities and privileges to the helpers from abroad. 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 155 



There remains to be noted the capacity for organization dis- 
played by the Palestinian forces in the acute crisis, betokening 
an advance in development beyond anything suspected by the 
casual observer. In Alexandria, in Jaffa, in Jerusalem, in 
Haifa, the organization abroad met a responsive organization, 
surprising in the Kolelim and in the flotsam and jetsam of 
the Jewries of the world only lately gathered into Palestine. 
Even before outside help came, the New Settlement had 
demonstrated its economic resources. The colonies had stores 
for themselves, and out of their superfluity could for a time 
sustain the cities. The Jewish bank had staved off a panic 
by devising a system of checks to be circulated among its 
depositors. In a word, there has been displayed the spirit oi 
self-help that may fitly encourage the hope that the gifts and 
loans that are the pledge of the Jewish world's confidence in 
the New Palestine will rescue the plantations, fields, and homes 
created by a generation. 

In that generation's hand-to-hand struggle with natural and 
economic forces, it has gained still other victories. A language 
has been all but achieved. The educational system needs only 
the last welding touch. In the spirit of the Mosaic law and 
the prophets' ideals, there have been initiated social forms 
of living pervaded by charity and based on justice and right- 
eousness. 

This record almost justifies the historical Jewish sentiment 
for the Holy Land cherished by the Jew of the Old Settlement 
and by the Jew of the New Settlement — almost, but not wholly. 
The spirit of each must yet pervade the other. A creative force 
already resides among the Jews who have settled in Palestine. 
The dry bones of gifts from all over the world have been 
clothed with the habiliments of life, and long-scattered mem- 



156 



AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



bers have been joined together into an organism. Jerusalem 
has begun to assume in a spiritual sense the aspect of a city 
that is " builded compact together," and Palestine of a land 
of a renewed social and religious promise, while universal 
Israel in the Diaspora, through an organized common endeavor 
for the Holy Land, is becoming a revitalized spiritual com- 
munion. But there remain dissonant notes that must still 
be resolved into the harmony of independent thinking and 
accordant conduct. A physical, merely passive coming-back 
to the " land of the fathers 99 would have been an anti-climax 
to twenty passionate, yearning centuries. No more can one 
be satisfied with a Jewish Palestine that is a "land of the 
children 99 and nothing more — of a future, however comfort- 
able, unhallowed by the past. One Jew and another and still 
another may escape to Palestine from galling oppression. 
Many have already found life there free and happy. But 
more values and more positive values must be created to justify 
the strenuous exertions of Palestine lovers and Zionists. A 
compact Jewish community, composed of members happy 
through untrammeled Jewish self-expression, must reconsti- 
tute a Palestine spiritually worthy of the unique place it has 
occupied in the history of human thought. Ex Oriente lux 
must again be a true saying, that the sacrifices in Palestine 
and outside of the land may have been worth while. It has 
been reported that a religious leader of the Jaffa community 
is busy studying the law and practice of the Yemenites, which 
differ from Ashkenazic and Sefardic law and practice, in 
order that, discovering the origin of the differences, he may 
point out the just method of harmonization. Sefardim and 
Ashkenazim, and the groups of Ashkenazim among them- 
selves, will learn to seek similar adjustments, and all together 



RECENT JEWISH PROGRESS IN PALESTINE 157 



will develop a synthetic theory to suit the enlarging and 
diversified need. So the law will live again, and practice 
cease to be the hollow echo of a former condition. When 
spiritual Jewish problems are grappled with tolerantly but 
earnestly, without the excommunications of the past or the 
indifference of the present, then the Jew's whole personality 
will be brought into full play, and for the first time in two 
thousand years he will in one spot at least fashion all the 
manifestations of his life in a Jewish mould. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

What has been presented, in outline in the above article, and for 
the most part without corroborating statistics, may be found in 
industrious detail in two recent publications, to which the present 
writer desires to express her deep indebtedness: 

Palastina Handbucli. by Davis Trietsch. Jiidischer Verlag, Ber- 
lin, 1912 (3d ed.). 

Die jiidische Kolonisation Palastinas, by Dr. Curt Nawratzki. 
Verlag Ernst Reinhardt, Munich, 1914. 

The second book named falls short only of being the archives of 
the Jewish colonies in Palestine, so complete is the information it 
offers. An excellent feature is a full bibliography (pp. XI to XXI) , 
to which may be added the following: 

Zionist Pocket Reference, by Israel Cohen. Federation of Ameri- 
can Zionists, 1914. 

Zionist Work in Palestine. Ed. Israel Cohen. T. Fisher Unwin, 
London, 1911. 

ZionistiscJie Palastinaarbeit, by A. Bohm. Zionistisches Zentral- 
bureau, Vienna, 1909. 

Funf Jahre der Arbeit in Palastina. by Dr. E. W. Tschlenoff. 
Jiidischer Verlag, Berlin, 1913. 

Genossenscliaftliche Kolonisation in Palastina, by Dr. Franz 
Oppenheimer. National Fund, Cologne, n. d. 

Gemeineigentwrn und Privateigentum an Grund und Boden. by 
Dr. Franz Oppenheimer. National Fund, Cologne, n. d. 

Merchavia. A Jewish Co-operative Settlement in Palestine, by 
Dr. Franz Oppenheimer. National Fund, New York, 1914. 

Sefer ha-Zikkaron ha-Yerushalmi. bv N. D. Freiman. Jerusa- 
lem, 5673. 

Die ansteckenden Augenkranklieiten Palastinas und ihre Be- 
kampfung. by Dr. Arieh Feigenbaum. 1913. 




158 AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 



Im Kampf um die hebrdische Sprache. Zionistisches Central- 
bureau. Berlin, n. d. 

Jewish Schools in Palestine, by Norman Bentwich. Federation 
of American Zionists, New York, 1912. 

Report to American Jewish Committee, by Maurice Wertheim. 
Pp. 360-365 of the present issue of the American Jewish Yeae Book. 

The map on p. 24 showing the Jewish villages, settlements, and 
estates in Palestine is a reproduction, with slight changes, of that 
drawn by Mr. Davis Trietsch. 

The writer desires furthermore to acknowledge gratefully her 
obligation for data obtained from Mr. E. W. Lewin-Epstein, of 
New York, and Dr. S. Kaplan-Kaplansky, secretary to the National 
Fund. 



LBJl'19 



